Masochist's Dictionary

Just Spit It Out

2006-12-22T02:50:00.000Z

Porky: n. Untruth. From Cockney rhyming slang: Porky Pig

The blog is dead. Long live the blog!

And unlike last time, this time I mean it, so please update your links and bookmarks.

Schtick Amnesty (guest posting)

2006-06-11T00:06:00.000+01:00

Irrepressible: Adj. Impossible to repress or control.

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

Find out more about this campaign.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Amnesty International
Ignore this, it's just a tag: Irrepressible

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Some blokes sit in pub, solve world's ills

2006-05-28T19:52:00.000+01:00

Left: adj. Not right.

You may be aware that a number of people have got together in the attempt to revitalise the democratic and progressive, er, left, for want of a better term, and have come up with a document that's generating lots of heat if not very much light.

The trouble is not just that it isn't an inspiring text - there may be a small prize offered for anyone that can dig out of there a quotation which would have me ~~manning~~ personning the barricades. It is more that, in and amongst the paragraphs with which I would tend to agree, there is a pernicious attempt to equate criticism of American and Israeli state policy with blanket Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism. I'm sorry, but that just will not do. Bad policies are bad policies, and vice versa, regardless of their origin. Hell, I was born in Bradford, but I reject an awful lot of the Blair administration's policies. Does that make me anti-British? If so, you'd better have a bloody good definition of Britishness ready.

In fact, there seems to be more about how hard-done-by the poor Bush administration is than there is about the tyranny the Eustonites ostensibly reject in principle 2. Two quick examples, and there will be many more: Why no mention of Uzbekistan? Anyone with the slightest ear for blogging might have heard a bit of criticism for that gem of a state. My own specialist country is Russia, which is likewise no beacon of democracy; I don't know if you know, but there are some nasty things still going on in Chechnya... I guess the news doesn't percolate through to Euston.

There is probably much more to go at, but I'm already bored of it. The last canard I will highlight here is the line that terrorism can never be "understandable". FFS, get a good dictionary, and learn the difference between understand and condone. If you never even try to understand the terrorists' motives, how will you ever hope to win the War on Terror, assuming you accept that such a concept is a valid way of framing the issues involved? You're dooming yourself to fail on your own terms.

It's bollocks, and deserves to be called as much. The Eustonites have got a measure so they and we know how many people have read it and signed. I'd like to propose a measure for those people who have read the thing but reject it. It's not scientific, but it's no less so than signing the manifesto itself, which only asks for a name and an e-mail address. Register your rejection here.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Euston Manifesto

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Give us a T! Give us an A!

2006-04-27T22:23:00.000+01:00

Fame: n.The belief that one will live forever

Blog posts are like buses, on this blog at any rate - you wait for ages and then, well, you know the rest: You get on, and find out it's not actually that pleasant an experience, not to mention the uncertainty over whether you'll get where you want to go, or whether the journey will be worth it.

Anyways, hello to all my new reader (Hi Mum!*) from the T&A article. If you want more slices from my domestic life (and let's face it, the political diatribing this blog now concentrates on is a bit tedious; it's done much better here, for example) then please click here. If you're only here for the kittens, then try this (nowt to do with me).

The title of this post reminds me of my old politics teacher - and that's the second time he's been mentioned here - talking about the only political demo he ever went on. It was freezing cold, so the slogan quickly changed to "Wadda we want? Cups o' tea! When do we want 'em?" etc. Tea Hea.

For the further-flung of you, the T&A is not me trying some gutter-press tactics to attract readers (you listening, Yorkshire Soul?); Nope, it's Bradford's very own upright organ the Telegraph and Argus. More on my thoughts about being featured in the other place.

On the off-chance that anyone cares, feel free to ask questions via the comment button just below this post: political questions here, and any other business best being taken care of in the Community.

*True! Although the only reason I know she has read it is her pursed lips as the paper was passed across. The thing about dictionaries is they have all sorts of language in them, although I think it's some sorts rather than others that she worries about. It's OK, Mum, it's the chorus of a song. If it's art, it must be all-right, mustn't it?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

That's Not What I Asked

2006-04-24T16:18:00.000+01:00

Conflate: v. Join two or more separate ideas together, often deliberately in order to mislead or divert.

More by chance than design I'm just managing to sneak in under my self-imposed two month barrier. Mr Battle has responded, and much more quickly, to be fair, than this post might suggest, although his actual letter - reproduced below - is much more incoherent than his previous efforts.

10 March 2006

Thank you for your latest letter about the Government's programme.

In view of your concerns perhaps I should emphasise that as someone who campaigned and voted against the first Gulf War - and indeed the more recent involvement in Iraq I did not believe it to be the right decision.

However, we still do face issues of violence and terrorism including in our own communities - as last summer in London and Leeds graphically and traumatically demonstrated. Of course we must protect individual rights but they are never existent in a vacuum but in the context of a society. Hence individuals are not free to say or do just as they like. Getting the balance right between personal 'freedom' and a real sense of personal and community safety is not easy in the current contemporary context. Those who believe personal liberty should override all (including some newspaper commentators) are campaigning (and misreading) the legislative and regulatory reform bill.

I actually believe from my experience as a Minister that a greater clarity between the powers of the executive and political authority will be helpful at this stage.

Thank you for your interest in these matters.

A few points:

1] I'm aware of and applaud his stance on the conflicts in Iraq, but that don't mean the same applies to everything else he does or says.

2a]Yes, I have been in correspondence with him over ID cards, and the grave threats that they pose to our personal liberty (not to mention all the other objections you can raise). Incidentally, why not follow the advice of Charles Clarke (and there's a phrase I never expected to write - who'd have thought David Blunkett's successor could conceivably be more odious? *Update* I gather it's not just me) and renew your passport now rather than get co-opted onto the National Identity Register:

anyone who feels strongly enough about the linkage not to want to be issued with an ID card in the initial phase will be free to surrender their existing passport and apply for a new passport before the designation order takes effect. (source, approx seven paragraphs in).

The 'opt-out' negotiated by the Lords is no such thing - yes, you can choose not to have the actual card, but you still have to provide all the same details for the database, and it will still cost you the same amount of money.

2b]Still, I digress: I was hoping my constituency MP might respond to my point about the increasing dominance of the executive over the legislature, rather than whatever some newspaper commentators might or might not have said about the legislative and regulatory reform bill and personal liberty.

3]And what does that fourth paragraph mean? In my eyes - and not just mine - the bill would greatly clarify the relationship, giving the executive significantly more scope to significantly change legislation without parliamentary oversight. Have you seen the list of acts which would be affected by this bill? I'm not convinced that clarity per se is such a desirable quality. If anyone still doubts this government's propensity for knee-jerk authoritarianism, just listen to the mood music being played recently.

4]Still, no such mystery over the final paragraph, although Mr Battle seems to have forgotten the second half of the sentence, which, given that he has been known to discourage me from hesitating to contact him, is clearly "now piss off and don't trouble me again".

Given everything else which is going on in my life at the moment, it's difficult to summon up the energy to do reply, especially if he cannot be arsed to even pretend to counter my points. So farewell*, then, representative democracy, it was nice while it lasted.

*Terms and conditions apply.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Ignore this, it's just a tag: ID Cards
Ignore this, it's just a tag: John Battle

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Let Battle Commence

2006-02-26T22:28:00.000Z

Re-iteration: n. Here we go again.

Readers with long memories may recall that, way back at the start of December, my feeble attempt at commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Rosa Parks' courage was to write to my MP. Once any new readers have recovered their composure after learning of my elan, they may be interested to learn that he finally responded at the end of January, and only needed prodding once.

The salient points in his response are quoted below. In the spirit of this slow paced correspondence, it has taken me until now to set finger to keyboard, but the reasons he cites, in conjunction with some newly proposed legislation that has even got two of the motorcycle lists I subscribe to in a lather, I had to contact him again. Come back in a couple of months, and I might have posted something else. There's about as much chance of that as of Mr Battle replying. Watch this space.

26 February, 2006

Dear Mr Battle

Thank you for your letter of January 25, 2006. In that letter, you write that “I am not sure setting up a select committee to look into the government’s actions would be a helpful or appropriate exercise.” Could I ask you to expand upon that statement, as I, like many others, am extremely anxious to understand the process by which we went to war, and believe that enough information has come into the public domain to cast real doubts over the validity and indeed legality of that decision. Given that the Inquiries Act 2005 has effectively drawn the teeth of judicial inquiries, surely a select committee would be a more robust method of investigation? You also write “I think there are probably more constructive means of improving government decision-making in the future”. Two points arise from this: firstly, I believe there are many more pressing reasons for wanting an enquiry to be held into the decision to go to war in Iraq than simply improving decision-making.

Secondly, that statement appears to presuppose that efficiency in government decision-making is necessarily a good thing. I am sure you are aware of, and deplore the concept behind, the phrase ‘elective dictatorship’. Can I ask whether you share my concerns that the current Labour administration appears to be strengthening the executive at the expense of the judicial and legislative branches in ways that gravely affect the health of our democracy. In particular, I am gravely worried by the implications of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill which appears to place great powers in the hands of ministers whilst removing the requirement for parliament to vote on same, all apparently in the name of increasing efficiency. Could I also ask, then, what is your view of the bill, and whether you intend to support it? I would urge you to oppose it.

I look forward to receiving your response as my constituency MP to the points raised in both the above paragraphs.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

Ignore this, it's just a tag: John Battle

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Lame excuse

2006-01-17T00:19:00.000Z

Shirk: v. Fail to tackle the important jobs.

So the government is trailing its plans to get tough on those claiming incapacity benefit. The BBc dutifully falls into line, running TV shows revealing the ease with which the 'system can be fiddled', or phone-ins allowing the 'general public' to ring in and berate the workshy, because their grandad, right, smoked 30 packs of woodbines a day, and lost both legs down t'pit. But he didn't riot, right, he got on his bike and looked for work. The odious and otiose Nicky campbell used to have a trailer for his phone-in on Radio 5 that had a tagline "Where the Nation Speaks its Mind". My inevitable adjunct to that was "Well, shouldn't take long".

We're led to believe, by the compliant MSM, that the scheme costs £12 billion per year. Fantastic, I like the thought that I live in a country where those who are unable to work - maybe they inhaled asbestos in their place of work, maybe they had an accident working at the docks - are given some support. I've lived on benefits, I know it's no bloody life of luxury. Even if we don't question the whole system our society is built on, for me this is money well spent.

But let's ask why the disabled are suddenly being singled out for attack? According to that bbc story, 1.8 million people currently claim incapacity benefit. Assuming they are pretty evenly spread throughout the country, that's unlikely to be a significant group of voters in any one constituency. A soft target, then. Mind you, the Mail reckons it's 2.7 million. The government can thus safely announce another series of tough measures to appease the populist press. Ah yes, the press. One of the biggest publishers of daily newspapers in this country is News International, which publishes among others the Sunt and The Times. News International, famously, pays no corporate tax in the UK. According to this 1999 article in the Economist, in the eleven years prior to 1999, News International paid no tax on £1.4 billion profits. Granted, som of this was written off against costs incurred in the merger with BSB, yet

B Sky B accounts for only that £317m, leaving around £1.1 billion in other profits. Mr Murdoch might normally have been expected to pay around £350m in tax on this. To put that in perspective, such a sum could build seven new hospitals, 50 secondary schools or 300 primary schools.

But even rival media outlets keep pretty schtum about this. Surely they don't have a vested interest in the tax affairs of media companies not being too closely investigated?

And even that ignores the fact that "our" glorious, free, democratic capitalist system relies on a large pool of unemployed people in order to keep wages low. If there is not enough competition for jobs, then the uppity workers will demand higher wages, and then how will Mr Murdoch and his ilk afford all those highly-paid tax consultants? At least have the decency not to take the piss out of those hapless, jobless souls who help underpin the capitalist state.

Oh, and don't mention the war.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: incapacity benefit

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

For Your Information?

2005-12-30T22:27:00.000Z

Resort: n. A popular location for holidays: a camp, perhaps.

I'm astounded, very pleasantly, at the response by bloggers in the UK and abroad to Craig Murray's appeal to mirror his banned documents. The documents give the lie to Straw and Blair's denial that they connive in torture, and deserve to be widely disseminated. Given the blood on their hands, it seems somehow superfluous to mention that threatening use of the Official Secrets Act simply in order to conceal UK officials' amorality - as opposed to, say, a genuine threat to our security - is also an indictment of this administration's way of looking at the world.

But what seems to have been lost in all this activity is the true purpose of torture; almost all the commentary, from all sides of this debate, I have come across so far tends to concentrate on the quality of the information obtained under torture. In Murray's words, this is 'dross'. In fact, this claim is uncontroversial. Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation, puts it this way:

No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

Indeed, as the same article goes on to argue, the contention that torture is a way of gaining information is used as a smokescreen to hide its true purpose:

In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information."

So any of us who had been concentrating on the quality of information gathered have in fact been taken in by the torturers' self-justifications. The manual makes this explicit:

"Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

The pictures so carefully 'leaked' from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay send out a clear message: "Don't even dream of fucking with us, because we can do whatever the fuck we want to you, and we will." I use the obscenity advisedly. Of course, there is no question of actually establishing guilt or innocence before, during or after this process.

Tony Smith, writing for the Australian Review of Public Affairs, powerfully summarises three main arguments against torture. The first we have already touched upon: it does not work.

"If the interrogator knows (read mostly ‘believes’, or ‘claims for convenience’) that the prisoner has knowledge that the torturer wants, then who decides what information is enough to stop the torture process? Why will the prisoner not lie?

Second: it cannot be controlled. There is a tendency to assume that 'civilised' nations - i.e. "us" - can keep torture to a minimum (the implication being that 'uncivilised nations' - i.e. everyone else - cannot), only using it reluctantly, and then only as a last resort. However:

"Torture is used as a first rather than last resort. Torturers readily contemplate going beyond the minimal, supposedly medically supervised physical stresses envisaged by these latest advocates. The logic of the torturer is that victims have their limits. ... Therefore, it becomes necessary to escalate the pain. This is not just desirable, or justifiable, but becomes logically necessary. To stop before the limit is reached would mean that the earlier, low level suffering had been inflicted for no good reason at all. What ‘good’ torturer would do that?"

Thirdly, it is unethical:

"Paradoxically, presidents and prime ministers assert that terrorists will not change the way we live, but when they plan to retaliate with deadly force and to lower human rights safeguards, they champion negative and fundamental changes. These escalate fear and provide the retrospective justification that supporters of terrorists celebrate. Torture, like extra-judicial executions, must be counter productive."

Smith concludes by saying:

"Evil means always produce evil outcomes. ... Torture destroys the dignity of the victim and the perpetrator. Resorting to torture destroys what it claims to save. ... Contemplating use of torture does not prevent terrorism but ensures its victory."

These two articles eloquently express a principled objection to torture, and I urge you to read them in full. To my fellow bloggers, I would say of course we were right to publish and publicise Murray's documents, but wrong to do so simply on the grounds that the information received was poor quality.

No, we should be shouting from the rooftops that for our government to condone torture not only makes us more rather than less likely to suffer terrorist attacks, it also reduces them, and by extension us if we do not protest, to the moral squalor of the terrorists who feel able to fell office blocks and devastate public transport.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Craig Murray

Ignore this, it's just a tag: torture

Ignore this, it's just a tag: War on Terror

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Stop Press! Politicians caught lying

2005-12-29T20:56:00.000Z

Torture: n. any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Forgive me for beginning by considering terminology; I am, after all, a lexicographer. Extraordinary rendition is an extraordinary term, but how appropriate for this globalised age that torture should be outsourced overseas, before being repackaged and remarketed for domestic consumption. "No UK agents were harmed in the creation of this ~~worthless 'intelligence'~~ vital contribution to our security". Of course, Craig Murray's documents, the ones that very strongly suggest Blair and Straw have knowingly lied to us about torture, are already all over the web, and big rounds of applause to all involved, but that in itself is no reason not to join the outraged masses. Where's my pitchfork and that blazing torch? There is some very good commentary out there as well, and given the time and family pressures I'm under just now, it seems all the more superfluous to comment much.

The one thing that I really want to observe is my sickness at the fact that the thing most dangerous to a politician's career is not that he condones the use of torture, but that he is caught lying about it. Bastards. Lying bastards. Lying, evil bastards. And so on, any good dictionary should be able to supply some more apt adjectives.

The text of the documents that the government didn't want you to see follows; if you have web access of your own, copy and paste away! If you're unsure, consider point 2, Article 2 of the UN Convention Against Torture:

# No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Does that make it any clearer?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Letter #1

Confidential

FM Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray)

TO FCO, Cabinet Office, DFID, MODUK, OSCE Posts, Security Council Posts

16 September 02

SUBJECT: US/Uzbekistan: Promoting Terrorism

SUMMARY

US plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism. Support to Karimov regime a bankrupt and cynical policy.

DETAIL

The Economist of 7 September states: "Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism." The Economist also spoke of "the growing despotism of Mr Karimov" and judged that "the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record". I agree.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.

Again we are back in the area of the US accepting sham reform [a reference to my previous telegram on the economy]. In August media censorship was abolished, and theoretically there are independent media outlets, but in practice there is absolutely no criticism of President Karimov or the central government in any Uzbek media. State Department call this self-censorship: I am not sure that is a fair way to describe an unwillingness to experience the brutal methods of the security services.

Similarly, following US pressure when Karimov visited Washington, a human rights NGO has been permitted to register. This is an advance, but they have little impact given that no media are prepared to cover any of their activities or carry any of their statements.

The final improvement State quote is that in one case of murder of a prisoner the police involved have been prosecuted. That is an improvement, but again related to the Karimov visit and does not appear to presage a general change of policy. On the latest cases of torture deaths the Uzbeks have given the OSCE an incredible explanation, given the nature of the injuries, that the victims died in a fight between prisoners.

But allowing a single NGO, a token prosecution of police officers and a fake press freedom cannot possibly outweigh the huge scale of detentions, the torture and the secret executions. President Karimov has admitted to 100 executions a year but human rights groups believe there are more. Added to this, all opposition parties remain banned (the President got a 98% vote) and the Internet is strictly controlled. All Internet providers must go through a single government server and access is barred to many sites including all dissident and opposition sites and much international media (including, ironically, waronterrorism.com). This is in essence still a totalitarian state: there is far less freedom than still prevails, for example, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. A Movement for Democratic Change or any judicial independence would be impossible here.

Karimov is a dictator who is committed to neither political nor economic reform. The purpose of his regime is not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls. As a senior Uzbek academic told me privately, there is more repression here now than in Brezhnev's time. The US are trying to prop up Karimov economically and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is underway. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion.

This policy is doomed to failure. Karimov is driving this resource-rich country towards economic ruin like an Abacha. And the policy of increasing repression aimed indiscriminately at pious Muslims, combined with a deepening poverty, is the most certain way to ensure continuing support for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They have certainly been decimated and disorganised in Afghanistan, and Karimov's repression may keep the lid on for years - but pressure is building and could ultimately explode.

I quite understand the interest of the US in strategic airbases and why they back Karimov, but I believe US policy is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism but in the medium term it will promote it, as the Economist points out. And it can never be right to lower our standards on human rights. There is a complex situation in Central Asia and it is wrong to look at it only through a prism picked up on September 12. Worst of all is what appears to be the philosophy underlying the current US view of Uzbekistan: that September 11 divided the World into two camps in the "War against Terrorism" and that Karimov is on "our" side.

If Karimov is on "our" side, then this war cannot be simply between the forces of good and evil. It must be about more complex things, like securing the long-term US military presence in Uzbekistan. I silently wept at the 11 September commemoration here. The right words on New York have all been said. But last week was also another anniversary - the US-led overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. The subsequent dictatorship killed, dare I say it, rather more people than died on September 11. Should we not remember then also, and learn from that too? I fear that we are heading down the same path of US-sponsored dictatorship here. It is ironic that the beneficiary is perhaps the most unreformed of the World's old communist leaders.

We need to think much more deeply about Central Asia. It is easy to place Uzbekistan in the "too difficult" tray and let the US run with it, but I think they are running in the wrong direction. We should tell them of the dangers we see. Our policy is theoretically one of engagement, but in practice this has not meant much. Engagement makes sense, but it must mean grappling with the problems, not mute collaboration. We need to start actively to state a distinctive position on democracy and human rights, and press for a realistic view to be taken in the IMF. We should continue to resist pressures to start a bilateral DFID programme, unless channelled non-governmentally, and not restore ECGD cover despite the constant lobbying. We should not invite Karimov to the UK. We should step up our public diplomacy effort, stressing democratic values, including more resources from the British Council. We should increase support to human rights activists, and strive for contact with non-official Islamic groups.

Above all we need to care about the 22 million Uzbek people, suffering from poverty and lack of freedom. They are not just pawns in the new Great Game.

MURRAY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Letter #2

Confidential

Fm Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray)

To FCO

18 March 2003

SUBJECT: US FOREIGN POLICY

SUMMARY

1. As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focussed on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth.

DETAIL

2. Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.

3. Uzbekistan's geo-strategic position is crucial. It has half the population of the whole of Central Asia. It alone borders all the other states in a region which is important to future Western oil and gas supplies. It is the regional military power. That is why the US is here, and here to stay. Contractors at the US military bases are extending the design life of the buildings from ten to twenty five years.

4. Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid - more than US aid to all of West Africa - is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov's vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He - and they - are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?

5. I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging).

6. From Tashkent it is difficult to agree that we and the US are activated by shared values. Here we have a brutal US sponsored dictatorship reminiscent of Central and South American policy under previous US Republican administrations. I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and "dismantling the apparatus of terrorâ€¦ removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms". Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes.

7. I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.

MURRAY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Transcript of facsimile sent 25 March 2003 from the Foreign Office]

From: Michael Wood, Legal Advisor

Date: 13 March 2003

CC: PS/PUS; Matthew Kidd, WLD

Linda Duffield

UZBEKISTAN: INTELLIGENCE POSSIBLY OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

1. Your record of our meeting with HMA Tashkent recorded that Craig had said that his understanding was that it was also an offence under the UN Convention on Torture to receive or possess information under torture. I said that I did not believe that this was the case, but undertook to re-read the Convention.

2. I have done so. There is nothing in the Convention to this effect. The nearest thing is article 15 which provides:

"Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made."

3. This does not create any offence. I would expect that under UK law any statement established to have been made as a result of torture would not be admissible as evidence.

[signed]

M C Wood
Legal Adviser

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Letter #3

CONFIDENTIAL

FM TASHKENT (Ambassador Craig Murray)

TO IMMEDIATE FCO

TELNO 63
OF 220939 JULY 04

INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK

SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

SUMMARY

1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.

3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state.

DETAIL

4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice.

5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture.

6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood.

7. Sir Michael Jay's circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department.

8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened.

9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true - the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.

10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact

11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;

"The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights."

While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present question also.

12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.

14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.

15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

16. I have been considering Michael Wood's legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material.

17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael's views on this.

18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.

19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale.

MURRAY

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Craig Murray

Ignore this, it's just a tag: extraordinary rendition

Ignore this, it's just a tag: torture

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Dead Academics

2005-12-20T11:56:00.000Z

Occupation: n. Profession, job, type of employment.

Idly following links from the esteemed pottymouth S Duck, esq, I happened across Today in Iraq. Looking at the posts for Monday, you can start by playing a quick game of 'Spot the War Criminal' with the image of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand. Then things turn more sombre as you scroll down the list of names, and causes of death, of people killed, in only one home, during a US attack on Al-Qa'im. Note, these people were advised by the US army to stay in their homes.

Below this grim list is a list of academics killed in Iraq since March 2003. Now, it's a valid enough question to ask why academics' lives are more important than anyone else's, and even though I have a vested interest, I have to answer that they are not, although there is a debate to be had about the toll such deaths take on the cultural and intellectual wealth of a nation, and hence the nation's ability to fully enjoy the freedom we are repeatedly told they are having delivered. Somehow, I can't see this aspect keeping Bush et al awake at nights. But my point is this: scroll down the list. Keep scrolling. At what point do you begin to feel sick?

I reckon there's a good chance that academics will tend to be well-represented in the blogging world, and will also,by dint of ~~our~~ their profession, have contacts worldwide. So it's perhaps more likely that such a list will be composed concerning academics rather than other occupations, no pun intended. Having said that, I've no reason to believe that academics are any more likely to fall victim to the dreadful euphemism collateral damage. Keeping that in mind, what proportion of the average society's composition do academics represent? So, if that many academics have died, imagine the list of, say, plumbers.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Iraq

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Perfect Retort

2005-12-18T23:29:00.000Z

Met: past participle From the verb 'to meet'. Meet, met, met.

Further to the previous post, here, via Tim Worstall's Britblog Roundup 44, is a series of intelligent responses to the questions in the Met's poll. Quick - tomorrow's your last day...

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Poll the Other One, it's Seasonally Attired

2005-12-12T22:44:00.000Z

Wake: v. End someone's sleep

So my PC's back from the repair shop, and as if by magic here's another PC springing up again. According to the BBC:

Anti-terrorism operations in London increased 75% in the wake of the 7 July bombings, Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has said.

I'm not quite sure how to take that. Is there anyone out there who expected that the Met might not take the hint on July 7 that a little bit more attention might be needed in this area? It would probably be more newsworthy if the reverse was true. And anyway, if this figure includes dead Brazilians, then is it necessarily a cause for celebrations?

Blair was quoted on BBC Radio 5 news as saying that the terrorist threat had increased dramatically since July 7. If he truly believes that, then here's yet another reason for him to step down forthwith. I might say that the terrorist threat had increased dramatically since the UK government decided to support the US in its illegal war in Iraq, but then I'm just a postgraduate student, not a senior public servant, so who's about to listen to me?

Ah, apparently he is soliciting contributions to his consultation exercise on the police force we want, and an online poll has been created to help us have our say. Online polls, of course, are famously not open to abuse. I'm too tired just now to examine the questions closely, but it's safe to say that at present I'm sceptical.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: War on Terror

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Sir Ian Blair

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Metropolitan Police

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

If You Miss Me at the Back of the 'Bus

2005-12-01T16:01:00.000Z

Omnibus: n. A conveyance for a large number of people. Name derived from Latin: "For All".

A few years ago, I was given a cassette (yes, that long ago... thinking about it, I must still have been at at school) by a band called the Railtown Bottlers. Someone heard the name, and said they were house band on whatever otherwise rubbish TV programme Danny Baker was hosting. 'Whatever' thought I, or whatever the equivalent expression was back then, and duly thought no more about it, until a couple of weeks ago listening to the inimitable Mark Kermode reviewing films on Radio Five, who let slip that he had been in Danny Baker's house band. One spot of googling later, and I was strangely gratified to learn that the most entertaining film critic I know of - even if he does still owe me a video copy of "A Streetcar Named Desire" - was also responsible for some music that I greatly enjoyed (hint: I wouldn't mind another copy, the longevity of cassettes being what it is).

Stand-out tracks were "I keep my broken heart in a bottle" and "If you miss me at the back of the bus". It took me embarrassingly long to realise that the latter was not just a nonsense song, but commemorated a truly brave act of defiance: today, it is fifty years to the day since Rosa Parks took her seat at the front of the bus, setting in train great changes in American society.

Things are far from perfect half a century on, but the late, lamented Rosa should serve as a shining example of what committed, collective action can do to enact change for the better. My newly-regained enthusiasm for political blogging is one way in which I personally can keep pressure on for change, and the "I am Spartacus" approach to the Al-Jazeera memo I referred to yesterday is an excellent current example of the collective strength of bloggers. Michael Moore said in an e-mail today:

There is probably no better way to honor Rosa Parks -- and yourself -- than for you to put a stop to an injustice you see, not allowing it to continue for one more second. Do something.

He has a point. I'm going, somewhat belatedly, to seek my MP's support for the proposed inquiry into the preparations and conduct of the war in Iraq. How about you?

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Rosa Parks

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Michael Moore

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Mark Kermode

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Aren't Bloggers Supposed to Distrust the Mainstream Media?

2005-11-30T22:29:00.000Z

Swarm: n. Snot cold.

But, hey, there are many voices in this country that would argue Al-Jazeera are not mainstream. And they blog. Cool. So, if someone will kindly back up that bandwagon a bit, just what was said, and in which memo? I'll publish either or both, should anyone want to send me same...

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Al-Jazeera

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Art of the State?

2005-11-30T03:20:00.000Z

Manifest: n. A list of the contents of the load, baggage or burden carried.; adj. Obvious.

So, I'm thinking about this scene I once read in an Iain M. Banks book, and want to follow it up, so cadge State of the Art off my brother on my bi-annual visit to him (maybe "lend-volume" rather than "buy-annual" is more apposite?). Anyway, it turns out that the scene I'm after isn't in there - if anyone can remember which book contains the scene where they play a game naming ships, be a sweetie and let me know, eh? But he's a half-decent writer, to put it mildly, so I read through all the stories in the recreational-reading-time allotted to me each day. I don't think I have many readers ~~full stop~~ who specialise in proctology, so I won't go into any more details about when this time is made available, just to say that I happened across an exchange in the eponymous novella (I think you should only, strictly speaking, use eponymous about named individuals, but we'll let that pass) which set off all those tedious deliberations about genre in another place: after all, with the M. in his name, Iain Banks is just a sci-fi writer, right?

For those of you not familiar with the novella, the exchange is between the ship, the Arbitrary, and Ms [unspellable forename] Sma; it concerns one of their colleagues from the beautifully euphemised Special Circumstances, who has gone native on the Earth, and intends to stay when the rest of the mission leaves. Consider this speech from the Arbitrary, listing some of the reasons why it is reluctant to intervene:

Two; if anything is going to convince Linter we're the good guys, it's being fair and reasonable even when he might not be being so. To turn on him because he's not doing just as I would like, or just as any of us might like, would be to force him further into the idea that Earth is his home, humanity his kin.

Now, try swapping the word 'terrorist' for Linter in that paragraph, as well as 'martyrdom' for Earth and 'extremist' for kin. Do you begin to hear any resonances?

Three - and this would be sufficient reason by itself - what are we supposed to be about, Sma? What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarrassed about talking about it? Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but - in the end - just because it is so hard to pin down and express, a freedom of a far higher quality than anything to be found on any relevant scale on the planet beneath us at the moment.

And this, then, after my short period of silence, is part of the purpose of this and maybe subsequent posts: what am I about, what do I think our society should be about? Now that I have hived off my petty personal preoccupations that other blog, so: Manifest-o!

In short, even if I had thought that I had sound tactical reasons for refusing his request, I'd have had just as difficult a job justifying such an action as I would have had I just snapped the guy off-planet the instant I realised what he was thinking. I can only be sure in myself that I am in the right in trying to get Linter to come back if I am positive that my own behaviour - as the most sophisticated entity involved - is beyond reproach, and in as close accord with the basic principles of our society as it is within my power to make it.

It is this final paragraph that has stung me back into action: even if you believe that the terrorist is not only real (New York, Madrid, London all clearly show that there is some threat, but I nonetheless subscribe to the Power of Nightmares thesis that this has been exaggerated out of all proportion) but as pervasive as the Bush-Blair axis would have us believe, even from that point of view it must be clear that the steps being taken 'in our name', 'for our safety' in the Global War on Terror ^TM can only make us more vulnerable: torture in Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons in 'friendly' countries; the ghastly attempts to make torture acceptable, including re-runs of the ticking-bomb fallacy; chemical weapons used indiscriminately against the population of a country we invaded ostensibly to prevent its ruler from, er, using chemical weapons on his own people; draconian restrictions on civil liberties. Is any of this, never mind 'beyond reproach', even remotely in accord with 'the basic principles of our society'?

This is not my idea of democracy. This is not the side of the barricade I want to be on, and I resist any attempt to make it a choice between being 'With US or against US". I will fight to defend my liberty; Yes, I oppose those who wish to dictate my spiritual views, or what I can eat or drink, or how I dress, or how my daughter dresses. But, equally, I do not accept the supremacy of the market. I do not recognise the legitimacy of a corrupt superpower government (note: it is the administration, not the country I despise. This is also a distinction I will fight to maintain). I reject utterly the mealy-mouthed evasions, hypocrisies and downright lies told to me by my own government (not in my name, though, eh?), and its henchmen of spinners and tame media. I can see how this alleged War is so convenient when viewed from the ~~bunkers~~ corridors of power, and I am not alone.

Shortly after her conversation with the Arbitrary, Sma returns to Earth, circa 1979, and has a moment of epiphany standing on a bridge in Germany:

The autumn sun was low in the sky, a vivid red disc, dusty and gaseous and the colour of blood, and rubbed into these well-fed Western faces in an image of a poison-price. I looked them in the eyes, but they looked away; I felt like taking them by the collar and shaking them, screaming at them, telling them what was happening; the plotting militaries, the commercial frauds, the smooth corporate and governmental lies, the holocaust taking place in Kampuchea... and telling them too what was possible, how close they were, what they could do if they just got their planetary act together...

I used to read the Guardian, still get the New Statesman, but even in the latter there is little of the alternative views I read, and trust, in various blogs and other online media. Maybe blogging is one way in which we can give voice to the concerns which are both Sma's and ours. We can at least keep asking the questions.

Here, then, is to the blogosphere: the freedom of expression, the freedom from commercial interest, "the right to be wrong", as a new book advocating religious pluralism has it. I'll go back to Babel and his 1934 speech for the right which is most pertinent to my blogging: "the right to write badly". Yeah, I know, it's another case of autumn in the heart and spectacles on the nose, and there's me due for another sight test, but I have U-turned: keeping silent is not a sound approach.

Ignore this, it's just a tag: politics

Ignore this, it's just a tag: Iain M Banks

Ignore this, it's just a tag: blogging

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Can you hear me, mother?

2005-10-29T22:50:00.000+01:00

Irresistible: adj. Can't leave it alone.

I'm over here!

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

That's all, folks!

2005-09-20T14:19:00.000+01:00

Valedictory: adj. By way of saying good-bye

~~Gone fishing~~

~~Back in five minutes~~

Bah! It's hopeless, doesn't matter how I try and gloss over it, the truth is the time has come to put away the definitions and shut up lexicographical shop. I haven't found a voice that rings true to me, never mind my hapless reader (hi mum), mainly because I have been torn between the styles of two very good but very different bloggers. Not that I'm claiming to have even approached the foothills below the twin peaks of Scaryduck and Justin at Chicken Yoghurt (see blogroll), you understand, just that I'm one of the many admirers of both. Maybe if I start another blog some time, I need to have some variety of poultry in the name...

To keep the avian metaphor afloat for a moment longer, any ornithologist will tell you that beneath the serene progress of the swan there are two dirty great feet thrashing away; finely-tuned prose is not tossed-off in a five-minute coffee break. Even the badly stitched together cloth of my posts needs a certain amount of time to produce, and real life has been increasingly intruding on that time. When I start my PhD again in October, there will be even less opportunity for me to post stuff on here.

But the main reason is simply my inability to distil my anger and disgust at what is being done in the world into any remotely-readable or coherent statement. It seems the revelations just keep on coming: for example, just what were those two British soldiers doing in Basra, and why did we feel able to drive tanks through the prison walls to free them? Never mind the other inmates of the gaol who also took to their heels? The whole pitiful saga in Iraq is playing out very closely along the lines so many commentators predicted, and only the neo-Cons and Blair's perenial pillion passenger believed it might go otherwise.

Our Tone is convinced that the quintessentially American bike he's on the back of is perfect for British roads, but as most actual riders, rather than wannabes, will tell you, Harleys are antiquated designs with poor fuel economy and ditto performance: they don't go, they don't stop, and they don't go round corners. They might suit the wide, straight, speed-restricted highways of the US, but the builders of our roads used to pay a little more attention to the natural contours, hence the sweeping bends that make biking on older roads such a joy. The complete failure to provide any form of meaningful response to the devastation in New Orleans shows the frailty of the American model. There are so many examples in public and my private life that increasingly bring the con implicit in Western consumerist society into focus.

In the end, I'm going to follow the example of Isaac Babel. He was a Jewish intellectual and author from Odessa, a man so full of self-loathing that he has one of his characters say to his alter-ego "Forget for a moment that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Cease playing the rowdy at your desk and stammering when others are about." In real life, Babel volunteered to join a Cossack unit of Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War. This is why his ethnicity is worth mentioning - the Cossacks have never been noted for their lack of Anti-Semitism. The resulting cycle of stories, published in English as Red Cavalry, are astonishing for the vivid portrayal of the horrors of war, but also for the searing self-criticism of the narrator, who is again Babel's alter-ego. It was a literary triumph, even if the military were unimpressed, but more daring was Babel's later refusal to publish anything. He had become, he said, a master of the genre of silence. At a time when the doctrine of Social Realism obliged all authors to praise and trumpet the joys of Soviet life, this was a truly brave move, which in the end cost him his life.

So, apart from the fierce self-criticism, it is clearly a specious comparison: there will be no midnight knock on the door for me. But I too, by publishing these excuses for thoughts here, feel implicated in the scam operated by this regime, this system. "Behold, we tolerate, nay, encourage dissent!" the apologists say, but in fact how much attention is paid? I applaud Justin and the many other talented and committed bloggers pointing out the sins of our lords and masters, and may their voices be heard by more and more people, but me? Bollocks to it, I'm taking my bat home.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Requiescat

2005-08-05T03:08:00.000+01:00

Felix: Latin, adj. What we are, just now, emphatically not.

The neighbours knocked on the door yesterday morning; they'd found poor DC deceased at the side of the road, presumably having been hit by a car. She'd never been happy wearing a collar, so we shouldn't be upset that the driver didn't come knocking; in fact, she spent a lot of time with the neighbours, so it was almost appropriate that they should find her.

We adopted DC as a kitten from a farm in North Yorkshire; a good friend had told us of the new litter of feral kittens on her dad's dairy farm. DD was only a few month's old, so we thought we'd just go for the ride and the scenery, but gracefully decline the feline component. Superficial and shallow beings that we are, though, we were smitten by the kitten, and changed our minds.

She was truly a cat that walked by herself, but that just made the times she would snuggle up next to you all the more special. She played beautifully with DD - she'd bat us instead if things got too rough, as though to say 'Keep your child in order'. The neighbours are moving to Ireland, and gave us their birdtable. It was a sight to see DC hunched under the little slopy roof, pretending to be a breadcrumb... The evening before she died, she'd taken up residence in the laundry basket. What could be comfier than freshly-washed nappies? Wherever she is now, may there be hot and cold running mice.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Suffer the Little Children

2005-08-02T22:30:00.000+01:00

Parenthood: n. Keeps the rain off mum or dad.

I'm happy to see that the latest piece of populist nonsense floated by the government appears to have sunk without trace. Apparently, Blair was minded to make the parents of excluded children take time off work to look after them. Top idea! The atomised materialist society we are blessed to live in makes the majority of folk struggle hard to get on the property ladder, get a new car in the drive, have a plasma TV etc etc. This does not come cheap, particularly given that the flexible workforce ministers are so proud of effectively means that people accept lower wages and salaries than they might otherwise be getting. The upshot is that in most families with children, both parents have to work, and neither are able to spend a lot of time with their children.

Who looks after them? Well, given that society is atomised, the extended family could be the other side of the country, or even abroad. Professional childcare is often the only answer, given that there are not nearly enough state-funded nursery places available. Of course, the child carers are also in the materialist churn, and they have mortgages to pay as well. Two friends of mine were living in Kent with their young son. All that the father earnt went on the nursery where their son was sent while the parents were at work. Madness! Still, societal pressures are such that stay-at-home mums are looked upon with a mixture of scorn and pity, not to mention stay-at-home dads. "What's wrong with you, can't you get a job?"

I do believe the main imperative for both parents to work is simply the cost of life - a roof over your head and the 'essentials' of a comfortable existence - in the UK. However, there is also the legacy of decades of work fighting for gender equality - women have fought, and rightly so, for the right to be accepted in the workplace, never mind receive equal pay for doing the same job as men. This is a battle that has not yet been won. The trouble is, might this fight be imposing a subtle pressure on women to reject full-time motherhood as an option? Might it be seen as somehow a betrayal of what previous generations have fought for? There seems to be a widely-held view that encouraging women to stay at home and mother their children is a very reactionary, conservative, even Stepford Wives position to take. I'm a little worried that I might be thought to espouse such a world-view myself by arguing in this way. To clarify, it is not my view that a woman's place is in the home, baking cakes and bearing children. However, if you do happen to choose to have children, might they not be better off having more time with one parent or another rather than going quickly to nursery?

In fact, research has shown that the earlier children are removed from their parents and placed with in a nursery or with childminders, the more likely they are to develop behavioural problems in later life. These are the very children that TB and his drones are saying should be excluded from school and looked after by their parents. If the parents take too much time off work, they will lose their jobs. So the whole sorry race on the treadmill to get the nice house and new car will have been in vain. Hmm, what price a happy and settled family environment once the financial problems kick in and the repossessions start? That will solve any 'problem' behaviour, won't it?

Still, none of the following measures would get the same frothing tabloid headline coverage, would they? The odd tax break for working families (and wouldn't it be nice if that system actually worked?); maybe a bit more pressure on employers to accept flexible working practices (or does a flexible workforce only bend one way?); maybe even the extension of paid maternity leave to at least a year, not to mention an increase in paternity leave. These would be public goods in their own right, but since this no longer seems to be sufficient basis for policy-making, from an economic point of view might it not also produce happier, less fraught and, therefore, more bloody productive workers? Oh aye, and it might just reduce the number of 'problem' children in our schools. QE-bleedin'-D.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Tobacco Companies Assert Smoking Not Linked to Health Problems

2005-07-27T15:16:00.000+01:00

Understand: v. Not a synonym of condone.

It's been a long, unwonted silence, not wholly due to relief at my father-in-law going back home after his visit. Spent most of the time in London, picnicking in Kensington Gardens while DD ran gaily round. You'd never think there was a war on. Oh, yes, that will be why I've been quiet - quietly seething at the nonsense being spouted after the most recent set of thankfully failed bomb attempts. I found myself pounding the car steering wheel and swearing at the latest talking head who was wheeled out onto the radio to parrot the government line that there is no connection between the war in Iraq and the recent London incidents. I don't recall his name, but he was on Radio 5 just after 5pm yesterday.

If memory serves, he was a representative of some Muslim organisation, so presumably the NuLabour goons who had groomed him felt he might carry a little more credibility than someone from wherever Millbank has decamped to. Blair was doing the same thing in his press-conference yesterday, as well. It is demeaning and insulting to our intelligence to claim that there is no link. Speaking of intelligence, the State's own security services were advising that action in Iraq was likely to fan extremist action against this country. Bloody Hell, lead warmonger Bush has constantly tried to conflate his War on Terror^TM with the war on Iraq. Now that they have contrived to establish that link, by fostering conditions in which insurgent suicide bombers can flourish, they have the gall to tell us that the two are entirely unrelated!

"Look at the September 11 attacks", they cry, "They happened before we went into Iraq." No shit, Sherlock. But aren't you forgetting that you went into Iraq once before, a few years ago. And aren't you forgetting that, even when open hostilities ceased (because, for some reason, it was preferred that Saddam not be removed just then), punitive sanctions were imposed that sent the average Iraqi into penury whilst completely faling to touch the regime. Aren't you forgetting that the country was continuously being bombed in the name of the no-fly zones being enforced? Clearly there's nothing there that can be a source of legitimate anger. And I needn't list the other grievances: Chechnya, Palestine...

And this is the thing that really, really pisses me off. Any attempt to understand the motives of those who blew themselves up is immediately condemned by establishment voices as encouragement or appeasement of terrorists. Do I really need to insert a disclaimer here saying that I utterly reject terrorist attacks on innocent civilians? However, my rejection of such attacks does not mean that I cannot also condemn the deaths of civilians in an unnecessary and illegal war. Where is the coverage of the Istanbul hearings on whether Bush and Blair have committed war crimes? On the way down to London, we witnessed the two-minute silence in Leeds station for those who were killed on July 7. On the Saturday, the news reported that 50-odd Iraqis had been killed in another car bomb. I am still waiting for a two minute silence to be announced for those poor Iraqis that have died as a result of insurgent activity in their country (and I place that restriction only because even I recognise the impossibility of getting either the UK or USA to accept that those killed by, ahem, 'allied' activity are may be worth mourning also. What was it Blair said yesterday? "Bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan"?) I think it bears repeating that, prior to this war in Iraq, no-one had been killed by a suicide bomber on the British mainland. Having said that, I am not aware that among the hideous forms of death available under Saddam's loathsome regime, suicide bombings were a risk either.

The talking head on the radio said that it is impossible to understand what drives a young man to take his own life and that of others. Bollocks! The urge does not appear fully formed from nowhere. Until we make the attempt to understand - and note, I say understand, not condone - the motives of the terrorists, then we have no way of countering the threat. And maybe, just maybe, the solution is not to use the military to invade the next suspicious Islamic regime; maybe it's not to subtly condemn the members of an entire faith by insisting that the 'Muslim community' should condemn each outrage. Since when was Islam a monolithic religion? Christ, even the Mormons have schisms... Maybe there might be just some value in examining the foreign policy of the UK, which effectively means examining that of the US given that the two are so closely tied, and wondering what steps might be taken to allay suspicion among the Muslim and Arab world.

Fuck me, I'm bloody suspicious of the US and the UK just now, and I'm from a Northern Methodist background. The driver behind my distrust is concern for the suffering of my fellow humans. If I had closer cultural or religious ties, then I'd be even angrier. The question is not how to appease those who are already extremist, surely it's more how to reduce that anger among the sections of the community from which the bombers emerge. If there are fewer places where they can disappear, where they can get shelter and support, then we are already on the way. If I can see this, if many others can see this, where are the eyes of the government looking?

One good place to start might be not pumping bullets into the heads of any swarthy stranger who might be feeling the cold of a London summer... "But he might have been a suicide bomber!" He might, but equally he might have had poor English, and might not have wanted to discuss whether or not his work permit had or had not run out. My father-in-law also felt the cold in London, and we were there those few days when the temperature was in the high 20s. He also has very poor English. What you gonna do, shoot him if he doesn't move down the platform straight away: he did come off the Leeds - King's Cross train after all? What a difference a letter makes, although he still wasn't best pleased, shouting is better than shooting every time.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

We were all Londoners on Thursday...

2005-07-09T09:36:00.000+01:00

Drought: n. It never rains.

...which does not come lightly from a Yorkshireman. Now a small part of me is on the 87th precinct, as well. What a week.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

G8 musings

2005-07-05T17:43:00.000+01:00

Exclude: v. Remove some members of a given group from consideration.

What has become of our society? The leaders - all male - of the G8 countries, the most powerful countries in the world, plus a few no doubt grateful representatives from other, more benighted places, are due to meet in a luxury hotel (incidentally, just how misplaced is all the furore over Jacques Chirac's remarks on English cuisine and what will be on the menu at Gleneagles?) to discuss matters of international import. This hotel is at the centre of an exclusion zone pointedly marked by a five-mile steel fence.

That's right, the leaders of what they are pleased to call democracies (all right, all right, you at the back, let's leave Russia out of this for a while) are so out of touch with the people they represent that they only feel safe if there is a five-mile perimeter between them and the nearest member of the public. The disturbances in Edinburgh yesterday got plenty of coverage - Radio Five Live began reporting the event by saying a building had been occupied by people "dressed up as clowns and anarchists". What? How do you dress up as an anarchist: Broad-brimmed hats, cloaks and fizzy spherical bombs? That's the episode of Mr Benn we never got to see as children. "As if by magic, PC Plod appeared" - and there will be plenty of people ready to point to the protestors and say there's your the reason for the cordon. But this is circular thinking.

In Japan, there were various forms of ritualised suicide. Although most people know about what is popularly termed hari-kiri, which was in atonement for one's own failures or shortcomings, there was another form (I'm afraid I can't furnish the Japanese term, popular or not) by which an individual killed themselves in protest at the actions or inaction of another. This was an indelible stain on the character of the latter: you should live your life in such a way as to provide not the slightest pretext for another to kill themselves in this way on your account; after all, it takes more than a trumped-up accusation for an individual to kill themselves.

Will any of the eight men at the G8 summit at Gleneagles tomorrow pause to ask why protestors feel driven to such desperate measures to make themselves heard, or will they merely dismiss them as anti-capitalist fringe elements? They should be asking how it has come to pass that they only feel safe meeting behind five miles' worth of tear-gas-and-baton-round-equipped riot police, and they should feel the stain on their and their predecessors' characters.

I ask again, what has become of our - and it is ours - society?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Economistical with the Facts.

2005-07-02T13:53:00.000+01:00

Cynic: n. One who understands cost, but not value.

The Economist as a rule comes out in favour of small government and individual liberties. I have a subscription that continues over from a past incarnation when it was required reading, and I have been surprised that the paper has not been more vociferous about ID cards and the National Identity Database. In this week's issue, at long last, and notably after the second reading of the current bill on Tuesday evening, there is a leader and a main article (subscription required, although I will go on to quote at some length under fair use provisions on review and commenting) on the subject. In summary, the Economist feels that the scheme is a waste of money and has poorly-defined goals, but does not share widely-held fears about civil liberties or technological flaws.

IF YOU have ever had trouble getting a book out of the library, Tony Blair has just the thing. A national identity card, as proof of who you are, could make life so much simpler—and it would foil terrorists, nobble benefit cheats, exclude illegal immigrants, end identity theft and “improve community relations” to boot. At a cost of a mere £6 billion ($11 billion) or so, who could possibly be against that?

Plenty of people, as it happens. As Britain rushes towards a national identity card, civil-liberties groups and MPs have this week been raging against the assault to the nation's ancient freedoms and the ushering-in of a Big Brother society. They are right to be fearful, but for a more prosaic reason—that by loading the card with a shifting series of ill-thought-through uses ministers will achieve little and waste lots of money.

As we will see, however, the very language they use betrays the fact that the Economist is not as confident as it claims. Since the newspaper is a big print media beast, widely respected as an even-handed reporter of news, let's analyse the two pieces a little more closely.

British governments have a long history of proposing a national ID card, only to back down at the first whiff of dissent. Ever-cheaper computer technology and political momentum mean this government is likely to stay the course. The chances of that received a boost this week when Labour won a parliamentary vote on an ID-card bill. Now the legislation will pass to the House of Lords and to Commons committees, where it will face more hostile scrutiny.

'Political momentum'? When even Blair is signalling retreat on the issue, saying that he 'had not come into politics to introduce ID cards'? Hopefully it will indeed face 'more hostile scrutiny' than that offered by the docile and pliant majority of Labour MPs during the second reading; hats off to the twenty Labour MPs who rebelled. The trouble is that the government has imposed a guillotine, which constricts the time available for scrutiny by the Commons. Again we will most likely reach the questionable position of having to rely on the deeply undemocratic Lords to defend our democracy. Not that New Labour appears to see any incongruity or feel any shame at this. Thank the gods that TB did not manage to complete his reforms of the second chamber.

'Ever-cheaper computer technology' no doubt exists, but we may be sure that it is still incapable of meeting the wildly exaggerated claims made by the IT sales teams drooling at the thought of all this public money. In my last job as an IT outsourcing helpdesk call monkey, the huge gulf between the promises made by the sales team and the reality of the service we were able to supply was all too apparent, both to us and the poor sods who'd call in when their systems went down. And this was a contract between two private sector companies. Surely I need not list the litany of failed and failing government IT projects?

Hang on though, let's look more closely at the main article:

The beauty of the new database, from the government's point of view, is that the information it holds on a citizen will be dependable and reliably linked to that person.

No, it won't. The information is dependable only so far as the person entering it and the person supplying it can be trusted not to make mistakes or deliberately supply false data. And that's assuming that the capability exists to create a database of so many entries, each containing so much information. I think that's a rather large assumption, and it needs to be questioned.

The errors and multiple entries that plague existing systems ought to be purged. As a result, and thanks to the introduction of a unique identifying number, government departments will be able to share information much more easily. At the moment, it is often difficult to know whether the John Bull known to one agency is the John Bull known to another.

Again, not true: the National Identity Database will be complied on the basis of supporting documents, such as passports and driving licenses, that rely on data held, er, in those existing systems. The errors and duplications will simply be replicated further into this so-called 'dependable' database.

As we continue, would you do me a favour? Please count the occurrences of the construction 'ought to' in what purports to be an authoritative debunking of the technological worries. To start you off, I've given you one in the excerpt above.

Prophets of technological doom will probably be disappointed by a system that ought to suffer no more than the usual teething troubles. Although government IT projects have an unhappy record in Britain, serious trouble has usually come not from technology, but from extra burdens and bureaucratic reforms brought in at the same time.

Another 'ought', and did you spot that 'usually'? And what about the final sentence of the first excerpt we looked at? If ministers can't make up their minds now about what the cards are expected to do, where are the safeguards that the NIR will not be subject to the same meddling as it is being implemented, with the attendant problems?

Identity cards will be phased in gradually, as people renew their passports, and, because the database does not replace something that already exists, there will be no “big bang” when older systems are switched off. Catastrophic failure can therefore probably be avoided.

No oughts here, but that 'probably' is a telling adverb. I would have thought that if the Economist was so sure of its ground, it would not feel the need to insert so many subtle caveats into its discussion. Bear in mind that this is a news piece, not op-ed.

While we are considering that extract, how about that phrase 'the database does not replace something that already exists'? Contrast that with the following excerpt from the article's third paragraph:

At the heart of the scheme is a national identity register, which will record basic personal details: name, sex, date and place of birth, address, nationality, immigration status and the numbers of documents such as driver's licences and passports. Those who fear the lengthening arm of the state should note that all of this information (and a good deal more) is already in government hands. [My emphasis].

So does the database replace something that already exists, or doesn't it? And what about the concerns mentioned in the leader article:

Few people would be happy for the tax authorities to know about their foreign travel, or for police officers to have routine access to their mental-health records. Even if this government pledges to respect its citizens' privacy, what about the next lot?

The Information Commissioner has said that the information to be retained, which you'll recall the Economist considers to be 'basic personal details', is in fact 'extensive... excessive and disproportionate'. I have said elsewhere that as things stand at present, I can prove my right to drive my motorbike by presenting my driving licence, confident in the knowledge that that document contains nothing more than the minimum information necessary to establish my right to do so. I do not risk leakage of my bank details, medical records etc. This risk of data leakage from a unified database is never fully addressed in either article.

But the most worrying lapse by what is usually an impeccably liberal paper is the failure to descry any difference between the data held on individuals by corporations and the compulsory nature of the government's scheme:

Nor will the register be a patch on some commercial databases. Pieter Kasselman of Cybertrust, an information-security company, points out that consumer data and credit-reference companies already know much more about what people get up to.

or again:

Yet people traded their privacy for convenience long ago. Britons walking streets monitored by close-circuit television freely brandish mobile phones that track their movements and credit cards that record everything they buy.

It is interesting how much the devil is in the adverbs: we do choose to sign up for mobile phones and credit cards because we are free to weigh up whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. As someone on the NO2ID forums commented, we do not face a £2500 fine for failure to produce a loyalty card at the checkout.

In the interests of fairness, I must admit the Economist makes a fine job of rubbishing the scheme as a waste of money. It quotes the Home Office estimate of £93, the Kable consultancy figure of £162, and the LSE's minimum (£170) and maximum of roughly twice that. It mentions the difficulties of estimating the costs given that the Home Office have not released detailed figures (and, remember, this bill has nonetheless received a second reading...) In addition, it pokes holes in the idea that the cards are a slight expense when added to the cost of new passports:

Much of the cost of collecting biometric and personal data has already been shifted to the passport service, on the grounds that passports must meet tougher international standards. New procedures (few of which are, in truth, required by other countries) mean the cost of a passport is predicted to reach £67.93 next year—almost twice as much as the figure for a passport last year. That allows politicians to claim identity cards are a fairly cheap add-on.

All of which I believe is a more powerful argument than they themsleves believe. Let's look at the conclusion of the op-ed piece:

The real complaint against the cards is that they risk being a huge waste of money. Certainly, they will be expensive, though nobody knows how expensive. The London School of Economics estimated this week that the cost will be at least twice the government's reckoning—and possibly much more.

Even if the scheme costs £6 billion over the next decade, as the government predicts, Charles Clarke, the home secretary, needs to show it offers value for money. ID cards can inconvenience terrorists only if they are compulsory, but at the start they will be voluntary. Because there will be no requirement to carry the card, illegal immigrants can abscond before the deadline to present it at a police station. Most benefit fraud is through fake claims, not multiple identities. Irish citizens, who have free access to Britain, will not have the cards. Faced with such arguments, Mr Blair was left to claim lamely that the cards would help people “get around more easily”.

ID cards are a costly technology looking for an application. The billions they will cost could buy a lot of anti-terrorist police and benefit inspectors. The government must make a stronger case before it spends its citizens' money on them.

I could almost have written that myself

I have spent so much time dissecting this article because, as I said at the start, the Economist is a heavyweight publication taken seriously by many people, regardless of their own ideological standpoint. My aim was to show that heavyweight prose can be deployed to make you believe it without question, but in fact you can still discern some of the holes in the argument. I have interpolated my own comments in the places where I think the Economist has either elided important points, made false assumptions, or is just plain wrong. Yes, the cost is an important factor, but mainly because the proposed scheme is unworkable; however, the key principle is that any scheme would be deeply worrying from a point of view of the state's relationship with the citizens it is meant to serve. I think the position taken by The Economist on this issue is narrow and shallow, and inconsistent with its usual stance (not that I
necessarily share it); it should be ashamed not to have taken a more principled position.

Mind you, it may be that the Economist knows its core readership so well, and so it knows they will be unmoved by any arguments other than the ones that will hit them in the balance sheet.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

The Emperor's Newspeak

2005-06-28T21:34:00.000+01:00

Reciprocal: adj. An action that affects the agent in the same way as the object.

I've been finding it difficult to move on to a different theme than ID cards, but since there's not much of import going on today in this regard, I thought I could go off on a rant about the debasement of our language. Hopefully, not so much the pedantic nonsense about whether it's correct to brutally split infinitives or to start sentences with adverbs that imply your attitude to what follows as the way in which politicos and corporations increasingly spout meaningless confections of words and expect us to believe it is all as portentous and meaningful as their delivery suggests. Trouble is, Justin has just done an extremely thoughtful and elegant dissection of this over at Chicken Yoghurt.

It distresses me that the Post Office regularly feels able to ignore my registration with the Mailing Preference Service and shove sheaves of junk through my letterbox. So it was on Monday morning. In a pleasing match of form and content, one item was a glossy brochure from arch-purveyors of junk McDonalds, boasting about how healthy and environmentally sound their offerings are. This was bad enough to face on an empty stomach, and in fact distracted me for a while from the really egregious offering: I don't who it's from (do you think I'm actually going to open it?), but it is addressed to 'The Householder. Hand delivered for your personal attention'.

Now, hang on a minute. Have I missed something here? Is this further proof that the War on Terror^TM is just more of the same military-industrial corporate bollocks, and in fact the robots you used to see on news footage disabling car-bombs have been made redundant in the knowledge they are no longer required - sold off to the Post Office to use their remarkable manipulative skills to trundle up my garden path and, leaving Postman Pat to sit in his van petting Jess and drinking tea, cybernetically deliver the mail that seemingly does not require my personal attention, ? I'm no Queen of Hearts; there's a distinct limit to the number of unlikely things I'll believe before breakfast, particularly now my homeopath's sworn me off coffee. Honestly, what sort of credulous, drooling, unquestioning consumer of intrusive crap do they take me for? Ye Gods! Make your statements meaningful.

Later that same day, there's a ring at the bell. It's Mr Betterware, back for his brochure featuring the clearly down-on-her-luck Ms Gloria Hunniford and the sort of item too ~~cheap-and-nasty~~ mundane for Innovations. Before we run through the dialogue that ensued, you will, of course, remember that the Elizabethans used the number of chimneys on the roof of their houses as a proxy for the warmth of the hospitality their visitors could expect. Our 21st Century equivalent at Dictionary Corner is two stickers on our front door. One is parallel to the doorbell, and reads:

No cold-callers. Your discourtesy in disturbing our privacy will be reciprocated.

The other is on the letterbox flap, and reads:

No fast-food menus, catalogues, charity envelopes or other unsolicited mail. Any received will be disposed of.

This second one is crying out for the word 'simply' in fourth-last place, but frankly will have to wait.

"Good Morning! I've come to collect the Betterware catalogue." Beams expectantly.

"Did you read the sticker on the door?" Beams slightly threateningly.

"But I'm not a cold-caller. When I left the catalogue last week, the note clearly stated I would call and collect it this morning." Beam is fading.

"You are a cold-caller if you haven't had an invitation from us to visit. But that's not the sticker I meant." Points to letterbox.

Without bending, face as straight as back "Oh, I couldn't read that without my glasses."

"~~WTF?~~". "~~But you could read the bit about no cold-callers without your glasses?~~". "The last time you called, I made it quite clear that we didn't want your brochures, and we would throw them out."

"Did you? I haven't got a note."

"Then let me tell you again. We do not want your catalogue, and will not retain it for your collection."

"I'll make a note, and they'll put it on their computer."

"'They' don't need to put it on a computer. I'm telling you as the local agent."

"What computer? I haven't got a computer."

"Oh look, just shut the gate on your way out."

<mutters> "I always do."

"!"

It's got to the stage where I open the door and chase folk up the street in my bare feet, insisting they take the flyers back. One clown said to me "Why not just chuck it away?" Because, cretin q.v., you chucked it through my door, you take it back and chuck it away yourself. Even the bleeding Green Party do it (that's how sound they are, cut 'em, they bleed green). Their canvasser (the only one I spoke to, I'm sure the door stickers can't have put anyone else off) said of their weakly newsletters "It's not unsolicited mail, it's our democratic duty to ensure that you are aware of the work done by your local councillors." And they seemed surprised when I suggest they put this on their website, instead. I still voted for them, mind.

Is it too great a leap to conclude that the contempt implicit in the tissues of deception and distortion that we hear from the lips of the Great and Good not only contributes to the widespread lack of trust in institutions both public and private that is so frequently bemoaned by said G&G, it also corrodes our own interactions so that we feel free to ignore the reasonable requests of others? It behoves us, like the little boy in the fairy tale, to point out that the fabric dressing up the Emperor's half-truths is transparent.Not that he'll listen... Mind you, it also behoves us to examine the warp and weft of our own words and deeds, lest we do indeed receive the government we deserve.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

And here's someone else missing the point

2005-06-22T11:44:00.000+01:00

Evade: v. To deliberately avoid that which is felt to be potentially damaging, embarrassing, or otherwise difficult to address.

From John Battle MP:

14 June 2004 (sic)

Dear Mr Lexicographer

Thank you for your thoughtful letter about ID cards. I have passed it on to the Minister responsible and as soon as I receive the reply, I will of course let you know.

In the meantime, with best wishes

Yours sincerely

John Battle MP

To John Battle MP:

June 22, 2005

Dear Mr Battle

Thank you for your letter of June 14.

While I thank you for passing on my letter of May 30 to the minister responsible for ID cards and I await his response with interest, you seem to have missed the main thrust of my letter, and so I apologise for not having expressed myself more clearly.

In your letter to me of May 23, you said that, regarding the ID card and database scheme, questions of cost and workability were paramount to you, and later in that same letter you invited me to contact you about this matter again if I wished. Accordingly, in my letter to you of May 30, I drew your attention to recently published information that cast doubt on both the projected cost and the efficacy of the proposed scheme, and asked you to comment as my constituency MP on how this new information would affect your thoughts and voting intentions on the scheme.

To help avoid any further possible confusion, may I make it clear that I am particularly interested in your response as my MP to this new information, rather than the response of the department and/or minister responsible for ID cards.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

The Masochistic Lexicographer

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

None more green

2005-06-21T22:16:00.000+01:00

: n. Derogatory term for a person with low intelligence. Derived from a French dialect word meaning Christian.

Guess where the Range Rover driver has been shopping:

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Pop, and, indeed, Corn

2005-06-09T21:51:00.000+01:00

Consumerism: n. A belief system that states an individual's happiness is directly proportional to the amount of new stuff they accumulate.

It's been a decidedly acquisitive few days here at Dictionary Corner, the new ~~toys~~ important additions to the household going some way to explaining the lack of blogging action. I thought I'd best say at least something tonight, as next week DB, DD and I are off to London to lift a few of the golden flagstones that I gather the streets are paved with, and maybe also have a nice chat with the friendly folks at the Russian Embassy about citizenship and passports.

Ah, citizenship! My heart's cockles were warmed by whichever of the Dimbleby siblings it was in the Beeb's programme on Sunday night. The first bit of telly I've watched in ages, and what a great choice: chocolate box footage - I do hope that there was no image manipulation - with just enough intellectual content to chew on, plus meta-analysis for the students of nationalism among us; how clever of Aunty to present this nation-building effort in the guise of analysis of previous attempts to weld together a national identity through art and literature. It just shows how subtly these days the British national myth is woven. Mind you, who in their right minds could fail to nod sagely in agreement at the choice of the 'Romantic North' as a starting point, with the episode's climax in Yorkshire. Well done the Beeb!

So, just what has been making work for my idle hands? Well, we now play proud hosts to a Parrott, which has beautiful coloration and makes loud squawks when squeezed. Rosinante has developed a highly experimental exponential gearbox, which while groundbreaking is a little tiresome when it bypasses 3^rd gear, and so we are very happy to welcome the Anomial Bike into the stable. Hilariously, the tattered saddlebags are genuine Live To Ride^TM Harley poseur tat. They'll be staying on an MZ, then. What's more, it came with an unadvertised bottom end that I may be able to alter with surgical precision and transplant into Rosinante. Intended as a stopgap, this Supa 5 is so much fun to ride round town and on the back lanes outside of Leeds that I suspect it's here to stay. Boanerges is a bit on the bloaty side for that sort of stuff, so will henceforth be wheeled out just for the blast across the M62 to the seat of learning or for longer roaming (because roaming roads are famously straight, and so ponderous handling is less of a drawback).

Lastly, thanks to the bounty of Freecycle - join or start a local group now! - we now have a popcorn making duck. Experience an auditory thrill hitherto known only to pioneer jet engineers as you switch it on, shudder with anticipation and in sympathy with the shuddering duck, then collapse with laughter as the exploded kernels are vomited forth across your kitchen. Delicious! Interestingly, I see that Amazon customers who bought this duck also bought Shaggy Dog Toasters. Hmmm, for whom do I see a tailor-made merchandising opportunity?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Seconds Out Of The Ring, Round Two

2005-06-04T19:19:00.000+01:00

Rhabdonecrohippophobia: n. Fear of flogging a dead horse

[Dictionary Corner
Somewhere in West Leeds]

John Battle MP
Unit 31
Whingate Business Park
Whingate
Leeds
LS12 3AT

June 4, 2005

Dear Mr Battle

Thank you for your letter of May 23, and for the swiftness of your reply to my letter of May 18 in which I expressed my opposition to the proposed ID card and database legislation. Whilst I do not wish to downplay the strength of my feelings about the principle of ID cards, I believe we will have to agree to differ on this particular point. However, new information has been published on the cost and efficacy of ID cards - two areas you see as paramount, and which also concern me greatly - since you wrote that letter, and so I would like to take up your invitation that I contact you again on this matter.

Regarding cost, various media outlets, for example The Observer of May 29, have published sections of a report carried out by more than 100 academics under the aegis of the London School of Economics. Among many trenchant criticisms, this report stated that a more accurate estimate of the costs would be £18 billion, which is three times more than the Home Office’s own estimate of £5.8 billion. I mentioned in my first letter to you that government schemes rarely if ever meet the original estimates. This is a major study from a highly regarded institution that deserves to be taken extremely seriously.

As for whether the scheme will work, just after I received your reply, the government released some results from its own ID card trials. Facial recognition failed for 32.7% of the volunteers, fingerprints were not recognised for 15.3% and iris scanning failed for 4.1%. So the most accurate method is the most intrusive, and still fails one person in just over twenty. The scope for chaos is clear when the system is rolled out from what must be assumed to be a tightly controlled test environment into the field.

Furthermore, the accuracy rates were even lower for volunteers who met one of the following criteria: they were disabled, black, aged over 59, had large fingers or wore glasses. It seems then, that the ID card technology is likely to further victimise members of many already vulnerable sections of society, not to mention those who fall outside of what seem to be fairly narrowly defined physical parameters.

The online computer industry magazine silicon.com asked a “jury” of senior IT officers from both the private and public sectors - organisations such as William Hill, Amtrak Express Parcels, and the UK Atomic Energy Association - to assess purely the technical feasibility of the scheme, not taking account of any civil liberties or privacy issues. Ten out of twelve expressed “concerns about the robustness of the technology to be used on that scale and the ability of the government to execute the scheme successfully.”

You mention four separate aims for ID cards. I am sure that you are aware many people have described the cards as “a solution looking for a problem”. The way in which different problems are privileged at different times does nothing to dispel this view. Whilst you mention benefit fraud, you have not addressed the flaws in the scheme as a solution; as I observed, the vast majority of problems are linked to illegal working rather than identity fraud. You also mentioned people trafficking, without addressing the obvious fact, which, again, I raised in my first letter to you, that the majority of people entering the country in this way will disappear into the parallel economy. Likewise, if an employer is prepared to break the law regarding the minimum wage, why on earth would they respect any laws on ID cards? I would be grateful if you could be more specific on how ID cards would help in these cases.

As for terrorism, Sir John Stevens has never, to my knowledge, specified exactly how he feels the cards will help deter terrorists as opposed to simply affirming that they would, and there is some contradiction in your subsequent assertion that Spain’s ID card system helped identify the perpetrators of the Madrid bombings post factum: tragically, they did not help to deter the attacks. I would also observe that we seem to be faced with terrorists for whom the prospect of subsequent identification is of little deterrent effect if they intend to be killed while carrying out the atrocity. The UK’s security forces are to be congratulated on the fact that there has been no large-scale terrorist act in the UK in the last few years, despite the lack of an ID card here.

If I may in turn present the views of a senior person from the milieu of security and law enforcement, Brian Gladman, retired director of strategic electronic communications at the Ministry of Defence was quoted in the New Statesman as saying: “But actually, the way this bill is designed enables a police state. You’re not going to be allowed to opt out of having an ID card, the linked databases make detailed tracking feasible, and a system with this combination of complexity and scale is way beyond the state of the art. It won’t be reliable or safe [my emphasis]. Anybody with access to the database will be able to target anybody.”

Lastly, I am afraid I find the argument of convenience you put forward far from convincing. In each case, we presently have the choice whether or not to apply for a passport, driving license, or indeed workplace photocard. Crucially, in each case, we do not have to provide any more than the minimum information necessary for each purpose. I can be confident, for example, that my employer will not have access to my medical records. Should my work pass fail, then I am only faced with the prospect of being denied access to my workplace. If we are forced to rely on one centralised database, then I would also be cut off from healthcare, bank accounts, personal transport… The false results will inevitably accumulate, for the reasons discussed above. To whom will we have recourse, and how long will problems take to be resolved? Rather than anticipate added convenience, I shudder at the potential inconvenience threatened by the ID database.

I hope that the fact that a major consultation has been carried out by the government does not imply that any views expressed now will not be considered. Is it not the case that comparisons with the wartime ID card are greatly misleading, given that only now is an ID card intended to be linked to a database containing a great deal of personal data about each individual? Is it fair comment that the government has failed to properly set out exactly what the proposed scheme entails? Certainly, the majority in favour of ID cards that you mention drops away sharply when more details about the scheme are given to those being polled.

I am sure that you have been following the revelations on cost and workability with great interest. Could I ask you how they have affected your thinking? The points I have made in this letter are of great concern to me. I would be very grateful if you could spare the time to address them in detail.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

The Masochistic Lexicographer

I am indebted to the NO2ID blog for much of the information cited above; it's an invaluable source of information, give them your support!

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Well, that was a waste of a stamp

2005-05-29T14:30:00.000+01:00

Attentive: adj. Paying great attention and interest to what is being said or written.

RT HON JOHN BATTLE MP
House of Commons
LONDON
SW1A OAA
e-mail: johnbattle@leedswest.freeserve.co.uk
website: www.johnbattle-mp.org.uk

[Dictionary Corner
Somewhere in Leeds West]

Dear Mr Lexicographer

Thank you for your letter about ID cards -Thank you for your very thoughtful letter, which I did read with interest. I do not object in principle to ID cards, but I do see the practical questions of whether they will work and whether they will be value for money as paramount, and will listen carefully to the debate before deciding my views.

The progress and use of ID cards in practice and any changes to the law will be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. The aim of ID cards is to tackle people trafficking, benefit fraud, illegal working undercutting the minimum wage, and most of all to be an additional barrier to terrorism and organised crime, which are linked in many cases. Multiple or false identities are used in more than a third of terrorist related activity and in organised crime and money laundering. The police and intelligence services - not least Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens - are in no doubt that ID cards would help them undermine and deter terrorists in their activities, and the Spanish police report that Spain's ID card scheme helped them identify the Madrid bombers more quickly.

The Government have carried out a major consultation on ID cards, and locally I have had several conversations with constituents and a number of letters on this subject and, while the majority are in favour of ID cards, I have noticed a clear generation gap in people's opinions, with those old enough to remember the previous ID card scheme much more in favour than younger people. These days, a majority of adults hold both a driving licence and a passport, as well as a swipecard or photocard in more and more workplaces - a single ID card would be more convenient.

Please don't hesitate to contact me again on this or any other issue where I can be of assistance as your local Labour MP.
Yours sincerely

John Battle MP

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Con Trails, Con Spiracies and Con Tricks?

2005-05-27T00:45:00.000+01:00

Gullible: adj. (deprecated) Prone to believing the most unlikely things.

It's strange how the atmosphere in your back garden can change from one day to the next. Tomight, for example, DD and I were sitting together and chuckling merrily at the antics of DC as she tried to deliver the coup de grace to the nappy bag drying on the line. Domestic bliss, pretty much. But yesterday, I was sitting there gazing up at the skies, feeling distinctly spooked.

DD sometimes decides that she will only go to sleep after exhaustive and exhausting rides around the house in my arms. This sends her off eventually, but it has the effect of several stiff espressos on me (what makes it worse is that my homeopath has sworn me off coffee for the duration of the treatment...) So when she finally dropped off, I went on a short tour of the blogosphere. Put it this way, I was half right when I decided to open a bottle of Old Peculier. A mere five hours later - there's the monkeys with javelins effect for you - I dropped off myself.

Two sites stick in my mind: the first being a Dutch Crop Circles site. I now have a much greater insight into the debates raging in Crop Circle circles; to the owner's great credit she does air many different theories in the ambitiously-titled 'Facts' section, even if her own conclusions are sometimes, er, questionable. There is, for example, a v-e-r-y dubious photo of an alien sitting on a Dutch youngster's couch. He has video footage as well, apparently, but inconveniently enough his dad has forbidden him to show it to anyone... Some of the glyphs, however they are formed, are stunning - there's one of a very stern looking alien holding up a disk, like Dredd giving it the old "I am the Law", which is fantastic. I love the idea that there is some sort of psychic connection between the circle makers and those who research or hoax them, so that there appears to be some kind of dialogue going on.

One of the comments made by the site-owner rang a bell with me: she was talking about her own experiences in cerealogy, and how she once asked the cosmos for a sign (scroll down past the Lord of the Rings poster and the image below that), and was rewarded with unearthly screeches. When I was little, I remember walking home from a mate's house, and seeing strange lights in the sky across the bowl in which Bradford is pleased to nestle. I couldn't be sure what they were, and I remember thinking how nice it would be to have a definite sign that paranormal phenomena do occur. That night, I was woken by demoniacal laughing that sounded like it was coming from my window sill. Of course, it could just have been a blackbird giving an alarm call... But at 3a.m.? (I have shivers running down my spine as I type, even at this distance in time...)

The other site I recall is very strange. Stuart Wilde is some kind of visionary or mystic writer (although he claims that he's not very good with timings for his visions of the future, which some might claim is kind of covenenient). Nonetheless, his articles are quite engrossing, although I suppose I would have thought no more about him had it not been for something he said about aircraft con trails (and he gets really worked up about these) always forming an X in the sky over the places he's wanting to go.

So there I am, with DD in the garden, alternating a mouthful of stir-fried lunch for me with one for her, when for no apparent reason I recall this conspiracy theory about vapour trails. Naturally, I looked up, and sure enough there was a plane laying a con trail. And then, and then, there came another one at right angles to the first, and I swear the junction of the - perfectly perpendicular, mind - cross the trails formed was directly overhead. I also swear that this happened literally as I looked up after the memory had come into my head. I now wish I'd run for my camera, but I was too shocked at the time to think of that. Coincidence? Well, from one point of view, it could be, and I must admit I began to disparage what I was seeing with thoughts along the lines of climatic conditions being right to encourage vapour trails, and anyway when was the last time I actually looked for any?

So along comes a third plane laying a thick trail. I could see the trail lit up beautifully by the sun, even thought the plane was above some cloud cover. The con trail articles mention mysterious black lines (they apparently often precede the mysterious planes). I saw a long black line in the clouds - again, you could argue that it's just coincidence, the contrail was throwing a shadow onto the clouds that I was seeing from below. Well, y-e-e-e-s, as Paxman might sneer, but have you ever seen this happen? Just after another eery experience with contrails? Nope, something is trying to tell me something. But what?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

While we're on the subject

2005-05-19T16:54:00.000+01:00

Verbose: adj. Having a tendency to be, rather than short and to the point, somewhat long-winded and possibly even repetitive; using a dozen words where one might serve; neither succinct nor concise.

[Dictionary Corner
Leeds West]

John Battle MP
Unit 31
Whingate Business Park
Whingate
Leeds
LS12 3AT

May 18, 2005

Dear Mr Battle

Congratulations on your recent re-election.

I would like to express my strongly-held misgivings at the Labour administration’s intentions to press ahead with plans for ID cards and a national identity database. I have both principled and pragmatic reasons for opposing this legislation:

On principle, it is wrong that the state should compile detailed information about each and every individual citizen. It is a step worthy of a totalitarian state, rather than the democracy I am led to believe we live in. I find it very worrying that the Labour party should seek to undermine our freedom in such an insidious way.

The pragmatic reasons are the following:

Cost – initial estimates of the cost are anything between £3 billion and £5.5 billion. I am not aware of a single government project which was completed for anything like the originally projected cost. In addition, each citizen will have to pay for their own card; is a flat-rate identity tax remotely progressive or, indeed, defensible? What else could this vast sum be spent on?

Scope – I have worked for a major IT company. The technological capability simply does not exist to build and maintain a database containing some 55 to 60 million entries. Can you be even slightly confident that the recent problems connected with, to name but one example, the passport service will not recur?

Biometric fallacies – again, the technology does not exist to ensure accurate matches. Furthermore, I value my eyesight enough not to want to leave it at the tender mercy of a security guard on minimum wage and a twelve-hour shift with a questionably-calibrated iris scanner.

Purpose – the scheme will not help alleviate benefit fraud, the vast majority of which is linked to illicit employment rather than identity fraud; it will not help with illegal immigration, since many people simply disappear after their initial dealings with the authorities. What, then, is it intended to do?

Terrorism – there is no evidence to suggest ID cards will reduce the incidence of terrorist acts: the Madrid bombings are graphic and tragic illustrations of this. The 9/11 hijackers flew under their own identities, but were not previously known to anti-terrorist officials.

Security – no scheme, card or database is immune to hacking or forgery. Evidence suggests that identity theft is a greater problem in the USA, where social security numbers act as a de facto identity number. Once the key document is forged, many doors are open. Perversely, then, ID cards may encourage identity theft.

Data leakage – how can I be sure that my personal data is being accessed only by those entitled to it? I may not object to my GP seeing my health records, but I would object very strongly to those records being seen when I wished, for example, to open a bank account and was compelled to confirm my identity via an ID card. At present, I can do so merely with a driving license – I do not mind who knows I am authorised to ride a motorcycle, but there are other aspects of my life I prefer to keep confidential.

Racial stereotyping – I have relatives in Russia who are frequently stopped, asked for ID and further harassed simply due to their ethnic background. Muslims in this country already complain of increased, and unwarranted, police attention. ID cards may help fuel resentment among members of ethnic minorities.

You will doubtless be aware that I have touched on only a few of the pragmatic reasons to oppose the scheme. I would be very grateful if you could take the time to address my concerns, and also to outline your personal position on this issue. I notice from your parliamentary record that you have always voted in favour of ID card legislation. May I ask what your future voting intentions are on this issue, and urge you to oppose further attempts to implement the ID card and database scheme?

Surely the greatly reduced Labour majority following the recent election must be seen as a signal to proceed with great caution, rather than as a mandate to bulldoze controversial legislation through. Tony Blair himself spoke of the need to listen more. It is worrying, then, to learn from recent media reports of plans to hurry through this legislation while the Conservative party is in turmoil. While I am no lover of the Tories, I am appalled that this grave threat to our personal freedom and privacy is being treated as some kind of Westminster parlour game. It demands to be treated with respect, and to be thoroughly scrutinised by our representatives in parliament.

You have been of tremendous help to my family in regard to another issue; I am confident that you will be just as effective in representing my worries on this issue, and in working towards preventing the introduction of this repressive, expensive, and ultimately futile legislation.

I look forward to hearing your views on this matter.

Yours sincerely

The Masochistic Lexicographer

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Benefit fraud costs UK taxpayers £3 billion, at low estimates

2005-05-17T23:30:00.000+01:00

Pledge: n. Instrument of murder in Crime and Punishment. Research is underway into its lethal effects on idiot legislation.

I was going to post about something else entirely, but via Nick Barlow here's an excellent idea:

"I will refuse to register for an ID card but only if 3,000,000 people will sign up."

— Stef

Deadline: 1^st January 2007. 129 people have signed up, 2,999,871 more needed

If you're a UK citizen, go make that pledge!

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Snakes and Property Ladders

2005-05-15T23:55:00.000+01:00

Municipal: adj. Of, or pertaining to, the city or town administration.

Under the right-to-buy scheme, council tenants were encouraged to buy into the property-owning dream through a hefty discount on the market value of the property they were living in. Sadly, some unfortunates found themselves having bought a house on estates where their neighbours had preferred to leave the headaches of home-ownership and upkeep to the council. The resulting ramshackle look did not advance the owners up that ladder so quickly as they had hoped. Using your skill and judgement, place an 'X' in the picture above as close to the centre as possible of the house which is still council property.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Feeling Sick

2005-05-12T18:14:00.000+01:00

Recantation: n. A public rejection of a previously held position

Apologies to those of you who did keep dropping by, but I (and poor D's B and D) have been proper poorly over the past few days, so tapping a keyboard has been out of the question. For me, it's a fair reflection of how I felt as the election results were - or more accurately, were not - coming through. At the risk of sounding like Ron Manager, it is all a load of bollocks, isn't it? The bleeding football scores of who has won each seat is not really politics, it's more just train-spotting. I didn't realise at the time just why I was getting so underwhelmed, but if you can be bothered to plough through the <ahem> minute-by-minute election night reports, you may be able to detect a hint of dissatisfaction

It's hardly a fresh insight, but the real politics, the meat-and-drink of it if I can use that phrase as an ex-veggie, is what the hell they will do with the changed balance of power. So I won't be commenting too much from now on about the Westminster It's A Knockout, but tending to concentrate on the issues that interest me most. Think global, act local, they say; some of it may be so local that it seems like navel-gazing, but then I've always had a soft spot for ships and oranges...

At this stage, I'd like to give an honourable mention to the 2CV Owners Club - any body of people devoted to preserving unlikely machinery gets my vote as an MZ rider. I gather their members have an ongoing tacit competition among themselves as to who can find and display the most politically correct car stickers in the window, regardless of the individual's actual convictions, so you'll find them tucking into fry-ups next to their Meat is Murder stickers*. The new links here, in contrast, are heartfelt.

*Best Smiths' lyric-related car sticker that I ever heard of was on an old Rootes Group camper van: "Girlfriend in a Commer".

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Eyes down, look in...

2005-05-05T22:27:00.000+01:00

Democracy: n.Government by the people

02.30: Well, that's me done for the night - DB and DD need a lift to the local La Leche League meeting tomorrow, so I'd best lay off the bottle, ho ho. The final ~~Jack~~ straw: Blair's been re-elected, although Reg Keys got a respectable result. The radio's currently with the Lib Dems (note to BBC governors, whatever you do, next election shoot all the impressionists), and I'm going to go to bed with their optimism the last thing I hear. Thanks for dropping by, you're welcome back any time. Meanwhile, it's still a lively conversation at Chicken Yoghurt.

01.50: Better news - rumour has it that George Galloway has won Bethnal Green, and the BNP vote actually dropped in Oldham West (although the candidate in 2001 was Nick Griffin, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest his armpits).

01.30: Well, my constituency have returned, and the Labour candidate has retained his seat, but at the cost of a 6.6% swing away. 7% swing to Lib Dem, but the Green vote actually dropped 0.5%. Greens at 7.5% total share beat the BNP at 3.5% (which is 1 167 too many, all the same) though. First time that a BNP candidate had stood here. UKIP and Tory shares both down, 0.5% and 1.3% respectively. Was a safe labour seat, is a safe Labour seat. Bugger. And Straw's back in. Bugger twice.

00.50: Way back when, there was a Private Eye cover of Michael Foot waving a stick and shouting "Come back, I haven't finished yet". Not that I'm flagging or anything, but there is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the comments over at Chicken Yoghurt - see sidebar. In particular, the way spread betting markets are suggesting a Labour majority of less than 60. Sounding good...

00.30: The Taste of Human Flesh in tribute to Michael Howard. I'm sure we've all wondered what long pig actually tastes of (not that my mind's wondering while the postal votes are being counted). Thanks to to the tireless efforts of a psychobilly in Huddersfield, I can reveal that it tastes of... What it was, was, you see, was that he developed a growth on his shoulder. Thankfully it was non-malignant (bugger, there goes the Howard metaphor), but it still had to be removed. Our Hero decided this was his opportunity to find out what human meat tastes of (and, as an aside, what would we call it if it was a regular item on the menu? Hom, I suppose, given the pidgin French names of our other meats), so he asked the surgeons to return the excised part once it had been, er, excised. Once he got home, he whipped the piece out of the jar and into a frying pan, three minutes on each side - rare meat in more than one sense. So, what does it taste of?

Formaldehyde.

I will be posting about burying body parts at a later date.

00.05: ~~I'm not deliberately doing posts every 30 minutes, I promise.~~ I can count, honest. Anyway, I thought I would be posting more often, but it's painfully slow going so far... The Lib Dems have Lord Razzle, the Tories have Theresa May. Is there some sort of tawdry porn conspiracy going on here? Who else is involved?

23.05: ~~Barely stifled yawns~~ Great excitement as somewhere in Sunderland gets the result out first for the nth time. And the winner is: <gasp/> Labour. Still, the exit polls are suggesting a majority of 66 nationwide, and let's hope that there has been enough clever voting in marginals to chip away at that figure. First bottle's empty, let's have another.

22.35: Well, that's DB and DD safely tucked up in bed together, so we can begin. Isn't it exciting, like a live episode of Corrie, or for older readers, Z cars? The first beer's opened, so let's set out our stall:

I'm planning just to keep updating this post, new additions will be time-stamped appropriately. I'll be starting off by listening to Five Live, but may retune to Radcliffe if things get too depressing. I'm deliberately writing this first instalment before I look for any exit poll results, so that my hopes won't be affected by the news. I dearly want a substantially reduced Labour majority, to remove the 'elected dictatorship'. This should be accompanied by a matching increase in Lib Dem seats, so that some form of electoral reform has half a chance, not to mention the softening effects of any coalition. I'd like for the Greens to get a couple, including my own, but I doubt they'll even get Brighton Pavilion. I'd hate for the BNP to get anything at all, and speaking of anti-immigration nastiness, let's hope that the only thing we hear from Howard tonight is his resignation statement. Top of wish list? The incumbent in Sedgefield to lose his seat.

So, what have I missed?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Electoral Collage

2005-05-05T16:32:00.000+01:00

Blog-a-thon: n. Live blogging extravaganza providing as-it-happens commentary on world-changing events, and elections.

With my usual sense of brilliant timing I went out to vote before I read this, this, and especially this. Thankfully, I did read them before I had my own go, and I'm happy to step gracefully aside and just do a bit of a cut-and-paste job instead (and there's you looking at the title and thinking you can't spell so well for a lexicographer). On my patch, we've a Labour majority of 15 000 to overturn, so I'm not holding my breath for a big change... took my frustration out by kicking down the 'Vote BNP' signs on the roundabout.

The CY Election Liveblog Guide

http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/current.html

If You've a Blacklist

Masochist's Dictionary

Incidentally, I recall from my politics GCSE that one of the things you could expect to see in a polling station was a police officer, I don't recall at this distance the exact reason why, but I presume it was to deter malpractice. When did this requirement change (or are the warrants sent by post these days)? There was no local bobby in the ~~old container~~ temporary polling station for my bit of the world... (At the risk of sounding like a boring old git bemoaning the dumbing-down of the world, I was in the first year of those doing GCSEs; while we'd done past O-level practice papers answering questions like 'Discuss the merits of the Select Committee', for the GCSE I was asked to describe the voting process. Literally. 'Mark an "x" in a box next to the candidate' sort-of-stuff, just like on the back of my polling card. Oh, it were all green fields etc etc)

Anyway, I, like the rest of the blogosphere, will be back online later tonight once the non-voting members of the household have gone to bed (DB didn't quite get citizenship in time to vote this time around - 16 days too late...). I'm joining in the Chicken Yoghurt live blog-a-thon or whatever the technical term is, along with the cast of thousands in the accompanying table - there's a constantly updated table of participants here; feel free to join in too.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Speaking of crosses...

2005-05-01T19:03:00.000+01:00

Crucify: n. common name for a tall, narrow-leaved biennial (Tragopogon porrifolius) of the family Asteraceae (aster family). Oh, hang on, that's salsify.

While hoovering the back garden the other day, I sussed out why voter apathy is so high and turn-out correspondingly so low: it's to do with the subliminal imagery involved! Rather than asking voters to mark their choice with a cross, a symbol that from our very childhoods is associated with criticism and error, simply change to the positive symbolism of the tick! Sorted! Instant voter feelgood factor, and increased turn-out.

My knighthood's in the post, along with half a dozen of my ballot papers.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

No, you fools! I said "Gaude", not "Gaudy"!

2005-05-01T17:55:00.000+01:00

Unorthodox: adj. Not conforming to accepted rules or customs.

Христос Воскрес! It's Easter Sunday today for those of the Orthodox persuasion. To mark Easter weekend, a grand son-et-lumiere show (among other things...) was planned for the walls of the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow on Saturday night. Images of icons and scenes from the bible would be projected on the walls, while a choir sang liturgical music. An artist's impression accompanies this post.

For an organisation that still seems rooted in the dark ages - just one example, menstruating women are barred from entering churches* - this is a startling innovation. As a secular spectacle, though, I'm guessing this would have been something to behold: you may gather that I have little sympathy for the doctrines of any organised religion, but the closest I have come to a Damascus Road moment was in the SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg; DB and I had taken my parents to Russia for the first time, taking in St Petersburg while we were there. The cathedral holds the tombs of most of the Romanov Tsars, and since the dynasty reigned for the best part of 300 years, there are plenty of them...

Be that as it may, we chose to visit the day a male voice choir were to give a performance of a funeral requiem. Even in the midst of all this imperialistic, autocratic regalia, even in the bosom of a fiercely retrograde church, I was transported - the beauty of the music, the range of emotion expressed. For the duration of that music I was convinced that there is a higher being, and that there is a greater purpose to this life. After the concert ended, just as we left the building, it started pissing down...

The other thing about the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, in which the SS Peter and Paul Cathedral stands, is that it also plays host to a remarkable statue of Peter the Great (incidentally, can you guess who was his patron saint?), which is, apparently, true to its subject in its surprising anatomical proportions. It is widely known that Peter the Great went incognito (yeah, right) to the Dutch shipyards to learn about ~~agrarian land reform~~ shipbuilding, not for nothing was he subsequently known as the father of the Russian navy. However, it is less widely known that in his wanderings around Amsterdam's flea markets, he chanced upon an ancient Arabic oil-lamp. When he rubbed it, out flew a genie of stunning beauty. "For my first wish," said Peter, "I wish to tower above my fellow men; for my second, I wish to drive the borders of my empire to the very shores of the Pacific Ocean; for my third...", well, you can see how that was misinterpreted.

* But how do they check?

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Patient Choice in the NHS - a case study.

2005-04-26T01:12:00.000+01:00

Iatrogenic: n. An illness caused by medical care

Just over a year ago, now, DB woke me up early in the morning and said that she had a raging temperature, and hadn't felt the baby move for a while. She was ten or so days past her due date, and had already had a show. What should she/we do?

At this point, I should point out that we had been good parents-to-be, and had attended all our ante-natal classes, and written a comprehensive birth plan. We had dug deep to hire an independent midwife: DB has a horror of hospitals from her childhood, and we also wanted continuity of care, as well as an advocate for us with the NHS. Not to mention the fact that when we mentioned the fact we wanted a home birth to our NHS midwife, she said we may be able to, if the consultant allowed us... This in spite of the fact that, due to her age and general health, DB was very low risk. As the Association for the Improvement in Maternity Services notes in its advice on homebirths, however: "even if a doctor has defined your pregnancy as 'high risk' you are still entitled to midwifery care and to have your baby at home if you wish."

The NHS direct site has the following to say about choosing where to give birth:

You are more likely to have an assisted birth, eg a forceps delivery or a caesarean section, if you labour in hospital...

For healthy women experiencing a normal pregnancy with no major complications anticipated during the birth, studies have shown that it is equally safe to be attended by midwives in the comfort of their own home as to have their baby in hospital... most women feel much more at ease in a familiar setting and require less intervention.

Fine, you think. But they continue: "However, home birth is only available as an option in some areas (not all), and you must be prepared to transfer from home into hospital if complications arise during labour or delivery." No postcode lottery there, then.

Even if you happen to be in "some areas", what about the attitude of "some" hospital staff, or even the attending midwives? I'm actually quite a fan of Reynold's blog, but I'm worried by the attitudes shown by him and the commenters as they discuss a homebirth he attended. In particular:

midwives aren't all bad. In fact where we are, I've never seen anyone a) forget stuff eg cord clamps, b) not be ready with resus equipment JUST IN CASE [my emphasis] or c) be nasty to an ambulance man (or woman).

Well, great, that's going to inspire confidence in the labouring mother, isn't it? DB knows a woman whose midwife was ringing the hospital arranging a crash team 'just in case', in earshot of the mother. Result? Baby born at home, fine, but one pissed-off mother! I'm sceptical about evolutionary psychology, but it does seem obvious to me that when a birthing mother feels threatened, her body might suspend the process until the threat has passed. But no, this is 'failure to progress', and calls for intervention.

Childbirth does not need to be medicalised as a matter of course! The vast majority of health professionals who are not midwives only come into contact with the very few cases where complications do ensue; they, therefore, automatically assume that all births need intervention. It has been said that, because 5% of births require some form of medical intervention, the other 95% of women are forced into hospital 'just in case'. As a corollary, the same person asked whether, if 5% of men are rapists, the other 95% of men should be jailed 'just in case'! If that comparison does not convince, consider this: the Reports on Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths show that suicide is the leading cause of maternal death (scroll down for the sub-heading). AIMS contend that this is linked to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder among mothers undergoing hospital births.

Anyway, I rang our IM, and she said get to hospital pronto, take an ambulance if you need to. DB was saying that she felt better, and the baby was moving, but I was panicking over what our 'tame' health professional had said. Incidentally, did you know IMs have no professional indemnity insurance? No companies will touch them.If you infer from this that I think our IM was being risk-averse, you'd be right. Furthermore, she had ignored DB's concerns over possible symptoms of Group B Streptococcus, and, what's even worse, decided to adopt two children well towards the end of DBs pregnancy. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, after hilarity has ensued when Roger, handcuffed to Bob Hoskins, has to hide from the bad guys, he exsinuates himself from the cuffs when the baddies have left. Aghast, Bob asks "You mean you could have done that any time?", and Roger replies "Nah, only when it was funny." The day DB woke me was the day - it had been drummed into us - our IM had arranged to bring the two kids home to stay...

The hospital staff seemed to feel their professional egos had been badly bruised by us turning up with a birth plan and an IM. Both the birth plan and our IM clearly stated that DB had a phobia of hospitals, and asked that this be taken account of. So the registrar sails into the room and begins some bizarre lecture about how you don't go into people's houses and tell them how to look after you. Well, no, you don't. But, equally, you don't insist that each and every guest takes their tea with milk and two sugars. The registrar continued by saying that if we didn't do what she said, our child would be born dead or disabled, and if we didn't like it we could go find another hospital. She would give us ten minutes to make up our minds...

We did manage to refuse any further meetings from her, but we never thought that we should just go back home. A consultant was summoned - ironically enough from home, as he lost no opportunity to remind us. He promised intravenous antibiotics, to help lower DB's temperature and therefore the baby's heart-rate. The antibiotics were never administered. The Trust have told us that we clearly wanted minimal interventions, and so - without discussing it with us - they decided to withold this treatment, despite it having been promised us, and despite it being the one intervention we actually would have welcomed. Funnily enough, the rest of our birth plan was ignored, and nothing was done to help DB go into labour naturally. She was hooked up to a fetal monitor, so she couldn't even walk around. Incidentally, the monitor was initially set up incorrectly, so that our baby's heart-rate was reading 20bpm too high - "S/he's distressed, and needs to come out NOW. We must induce." It was our IM who noticed...

The rest was a classic cascade of interventions, I still recall with despair the way DB said they may as well do a section straight away as they began to induce her. Our IM was unable to practice in the hospital, for tiresome legal reasons, but the hospital midwife was, not to mince words, a cow. She had a northern accent, as do I. This may seem unremarkable, but we were in Aylesbury at the time. If you've read any of my other posts, you'll know that DB has mixed Russian and Vietnamese heritage, and is thus visibly a member of a minority. Mind you, the way she was swearing in Russian was a bit of a giveaway that she might be a foreigner. Bear in mind the context, and the remarks made by the registrar during this next bit. So she picks up on my accent, and asks where I'm from. "Oooh", she says, "I used to have a colleague from Bradford, only he was sacked for saying what we all think: that foreigners shouldn't come across here and impose their ways on us." Well, love, you might be surprised to learn that we don't all think that. In the Trust's second response to our complaint, we are told that the midwife does not recall this remark. I'll bet she doesn't. We do, and only one of us wasn't in labour. Two 1993 studies, by Parsons, and by Crowley et al., appear to suggest that instrumental delivieries and C-sections are more common among women from black and other ethnic minority communities.

It was this midwife who also made the only reference to our birth plan in our hearing: following the inevitable C-section, and after we had fought off her efforts to bathe our daughter (whose APGAR scores, incidentally, at one, five and ten minutes were 9, 10, and 10...)- before we tried to latch her on for breast-feeding, our IM asked about Vitamin K. "Oh, it's in their birth plan, they're not having any." Excuse me, we are in the room, you can address us. Apart from which, maybe we'd now like to re-assess the tiny portion of our birth plan that you haven't already pissed all over.

A year has passed, and I am still so fucking angry at what they did to us in that hospital. DB is a broken shadow of the confident, sunny person with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and, I guess, so am I. Yes, we knew becoming parents would be a challenge, but we didn't realise they hamstring you in the hospital just as you begin.

A year has passed, and we still have no substantive answers to the points we have raised in our complaints to the trust. The correspondence continues, and meanwhile we are trapped in this web, while the spider keeps strolling towards us and sucking the joy out of our existence.

DD - we love you.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Who's the prime minister, dear?

2005-04-25T11:12:00.000+01:00

Emetic: adj.That which, when ingested, induces vomiting

Plenty of nauseating material around over the last week, what with the election campaign going on. I see Enoch's been ranting on about 'Rivers of Blood' again. Anyway, never mind thirty-year flashbacks: courtesy of DB, and in the hope of sponsorship from a manufacturer of aircraft sick bags, I offer you this. And this.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Psephological traffic lights

2005-04-17T17:47:00.000+01:00

Ellipsis: n. ...

The first colour's simple: Labour=Red=Stop. The message is clear, don't vote labour (the beauty of this metaphor is that Blue does not even come in for consideration). However, fools rush in*, so they say. There I am in my previous post, trying to play the political sophisticate for all the world to see. Obviously, so my unblogged reasoning went, disaffected Labour voters are not going to defect to the Tories, so they'll register their disillusionment by voting Lib Dem, so the Amber light was flashing for tactical votes, as well as the civil liberties and anti-war stance.

But a flashing amber light can also be a hazard warning: look at the 2001 election results for this constituency (courtesy of the Guardian politics website):

Party	Votes	Share
Labour	19,943	62.1
Conservative	5,008	15.6
Liberal Democrat	3,350	10.4
Green	2,573	8.0

Labour majority: 14,935
Time of declaration: June 8 2001
Turnout: 50.0 %

So there's only 2% difference in support between Lib Dem and Green in 2001. Since then, this ward has returned three Green councillors in local elections, and they're in coalition with Labour on the city council. This constituency is one of four where the Greens have high hopes of returning an MP to Westminster. Labour have a huge lead, but The Green canvassers (what lovely material they had...) I was speaking to today told me that many traditional Labour supporters on the ~~sink estate~~ sought-after location on the other side of the valley have been telling them they either won't vote at all, or will vote Green, but then the canvassers would say that, wouldn't they?

So, although I support the Lib Dems on the two points mentioned, it was really going to be a tactical vote. I would vote Green in local elections, but is it time to go national, or will my tactical vote misfire? It would be cool if our local MP was Green, but I'm mainly concerned with reducing/removing the Labour majority. The metaphor's guidance is clear - Green=Go! - but, if it's wrong to wish on Space Hardware** when looking for a New England, is it any better to trust street furniture?

*It's entirely incidental to this post, but for years I have been plagued by the knowledge that there is a linguistic term that means, specifically, the quotation of half a proverb in the confidence that one's audience will know the whole, without actually being able to recall what the term is. Answers on a postcard, please...

**Another of the blogs that inspired*** me to start; he's buggered off to Hanoi, never mind New England... My advice is watch out for the great big hairy spiders in the bath(room).

***Any resemblance to Scaryduck suggested by this liberal sprinkling of footnotes is pure wishful thinking on my part.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

The weather's here, wish you were...

2005-04-13T16:37:00.000+01:00

Lovely: adj. So nice, one could love it. Especially used of tea.

Well, I don't know, you go away for a few quiet days in the lake district, and all hell breaks loose without you: Tony Blair can't continue without his definitions, so goes to see the queen; Her son continues his republican fifth-column activities by marrying a divorcee; The pope stuns the crowds in St Peter's Square with his Sooty impressions ("What's that, your holiness?"); Scaryduck ditto by writing two - count 'em - posts on politics in quick succession (ie unlike what the Prince of Wales can expect); Likewise ditto - Jas has been to the States; Wrapstar hangs up his headset for the last time in Call Centre Confidential, and starts telling shaggy dog tales instead.

I was a late-comer to CCC, I wish I'd known about it when I was a call monkey for an IT outsourcing company - one of the many reasons why I'm opposed to ID cards is that I know first-hand how little ability there is to handle the technical side. I could have told Wrapstar how to avoid the embarrassing call centre leaving ceremonials - work out your notice on paternity leave. Admittedly, this does imply 9 months' worth of forward planning. On this note, congratulations to Guido Fawkes, who has saved me the job of taking apart the cynical and despicable anti-immigration rhetoric being deployed, not just by the Tories of whom I'd expect nothing better, but also New Labour.

Likewise congratulations to Charles Kennedy. The politicos reckon that the electorate are so thick/shallow that being obviously fertile will boost his chances... Well, I'll endorse the Lib Dems - see below, cheers Merialc - for being consistently anti-war and pro-civil liberties, but I have to take issue with Charlie's praise for NHS maternity services. This comment is not made lightly - I will expand in another post.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -26
Conservative -57
	Liberal Democrat 76
	UK Independence Party 4
	Green 43

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

On the horn of a dilemma

2005-03-30T23:23:00.000+01:00

Double entendre: n. phr. An ostensibly innocent phrase that just happens to carry sexual connotations. Staple of the Great British Sense of Humour.

We've finally got our pushbikes roadworthy again, mainly due to the car needing some work for its MoT - our own well-being and that of the planet clearly not being incentive enough. By way of celebration, I tried riding into town along the canal. These new all-terrain bikes are good, aren't they? Never once got wet.

The towpath is certainly a much nicer cycling route than it was when I used to skive off from school ("Politics: Ian is an excellent student, when present" (c)1991 M. Simpson), but somewhat spoilt by the office refugees jogging along in their lunch hour. What with all the round shiny faces and the puffing, for a moment I thought I'd got caught up in auditions for Thomas the Tank Engine. I got quite wearied of politely coughing, saying "Excuse Me!" and, in best panto tradition, shouting "Behind you!", and decided that I simply had to have an audible warning device other than my own good voice: believe it or not, I do occasionally tire of hearing it.

To the local bicycling emporium, then, and don't spare the, er, legs! I-say-I-say-I-say: Why do cows have bells? Because their horns don't work. Ah, but not for this kiddo: a bulb horn it has to be. But language, so often my trusty ally, lets me down. Picture the scene - I stride confidently into the shop, noting the two bright assistants behind the counter. Students, maybe, supplementing their grants, I don't know. The key point is their youth, relative to yours truly. To the young man, I begin "Have you got..." Christ! I can't ask him if he has a horn, I mean, we haven't even been introduced. Smoothly, I change eye contact to his colleague, "... any..." aw, no, not hooters. Did my eyes involuntarily flick to her chest?

I'm very pleased with my new bell, you know.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Swinging Sixties

2005-03-29T15:15:00.000+01:00

Sulphur: n. Chemical element; a highly flammable yellow powder, insoluble in water.

They'd already been aware of each other through chapel outings and the like, but he really caught her eye when he became a lay preacher. As she tells it, he'd roar up to the chapel door on his bike, stride down the aisle in his leathers, swing up into the pulpit and deliver a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon. He clearly didn't have entirely the intended effect on at least one member of the congregation... I've only really heard him speak in public once, and that was on their silver wedding day, eleven years ago now; I regret I never heard him give a sermon. In her version, I always picture him arriving on some lairy old - although I guess it wouldn't have been, then - British twin. He tells me it was, in fact, an Ariel Leader. Ah, well. Happy Anniversary!

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Spiders 2 (Ian 0) - not a cricket score

2005-03-22T23:10:00.000Z

Mole Cricket: n. A family (Gryllotalpidae) of insects related to crickets and grasshoppers. Some of the genera included are Gryllotalpa, Neocurtilla, and Scapteriscus.

Further to the spin doctory, DB tells me that spiders are highly thought of in Vietnam - it's good luck, apparently, to have one in the bathroom. I'm looking forward to when we do actually go and pay our respects to the farthest-flung family members, and I get to have a sub-Flanders and Swan moment clad only in my tropical-weight pyjamas...

As part of my ceaseless research for your benefit, I can also add that Little Miss Muffett was the victim of horrific child abuse, although this article takes a more nuanced approach, and wins a mention here because it connects Ms Muffet to mole crickets, which DB and I share a special fondness for... You'll doubtless be thrilled to hear there exists a Mole Cricket Management Guide, but it doesn't contain enough motivational language for me*.

* To the extent that I can't be arsed to come up with the thinking-outside-the-cricket-box gag which is just begging to be made.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

I was a veggie for 6 years, you know.

2005-03-19T01:47:00.000Z

Hollywood Ending: n. phr. Derived from mainstream cinema's reluctance to challenge audience expectation and narrative convention, this term describes any conclusion to a story in which any or all of the following occurs: the guy gets the girl; the bad guys lose out; the plucky underdogs win the big game; the sun comes out; Di Caprio freezes/drowns (still not worth a three hour wait). Feel free to add to this definition.

Be warned, what follows is as it was told to me, but it's not fit reading for the squeamish.

I remember a mate had just started work teaching in all-girls school, after a stint as a psychiatric nurse. The perfect training, you might think. But he chose instead to recall he had once sought employment in the local abattoir. Competition wasn't exactly high, for some reason, so he was in.

They start you off slowly, he says, unloading the livestock off the trucks to get you used to the nature of the work. But even if you're not sure yet what's involved, the beasts know exactly where they've come. Having a strong stomach, and a partiality to the cut-price meat staff scheme, Our Hero rose through the ranks as he sank through the circles of ungulant hell, till he reached the ante-chamber of doom.

As it would be inhumane to just slaughter the animals like that, by law they had to stun the poor beasts first. This was done by administering a large voltage to the head before hoisting the hopefully unconscious animal onto the next hook on the overhead conveyor, and it whips round at some speed, you know. The few that haven't already shat themselves tend to choose this time to relieve themselves of any remaining bowel content, which saves the butcher a job, I suppose. Added to which, if you have sixty head of sheep off the same truck coming through at once, all bleating and panicky, you may be less than thorough with the electrocution device; after all, the damn beast is about to have its throat cut, so why bother? To add to the olfactory onslaught, then, you have the shrieks of the poorly stunned as they writhe on the hooks.

But despite the recruitment problems, don't think that it's an unremittingly grim workplace, why no! Just like the long weight and the long stand, in the slaughterhouse the glass hammer is found in the trench on the floor of the room. This collects all the substances that fall, and has gratings that allow the liquids to drain through the trench floor, thus leaving the more solid matter to be shovelled into the bins thoughtfully provided by the management. Jovial souls liked to remove these gratings, so that the hapless new arrival, who, natch, was prime candidate for the shovel, suddenly found himself, rather than knee-deep, up to his chin (if he was lucky).

One day, Our Hero was in the trench, when a poorly-stunned ewe in its death agony nonetheless managed to bring its lamb into the world. Immediately, the two grizzled old hands he was working with - who used to find nothing funnier than watching OH finding out the hard way that the grating had been moved, again - were barking at him to hoik it out and up to them. They ran for towels, and hot water from the kettle, then back to the tea-room for a pint of milk. They rubbed the poor mite, and got it standing, albeit shakily, on the desk, and there were, if not tears of pride, then lumps of throat as it guzzled milk from an enamel mug.

Then the supervisor came striding into the room, and came across to the proud step-fathers. He picked the lamb and cuddled it, saying "Well done, lads.". Then he wrang its neck and chucked it in the bin with the words "Now get back to fucking work!"

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Pomp, incircumstantial.

2005-03-17T19:46:00.000Z

Rigmarole: n. A complex although ultimately pointless procedure.

A year or so ago, the Home Office announced that all successful applicants for British citizenship would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the reigning monarch as a condition of becoming a citizen. My republican hackles were raised then, as it's just another populist sop to the anti-immigration lobby: how many of them have had to make the same oath? Trouble is, I can't imagine that any of them would particularly mind. Funnily enough, I bet you that it's the same crew who constantly moan about the cost of government, and boast about the 'efficiency savings' that would accrue once they were in power.

So it's difficult to know which side of their views would have been appeased by the ceremony that it was the dubious privilege of DB, DD and myself to attend today - the best civic crockery and silver spoons were out for our 'light refreshment', and a ceramic mug of the city was ours, well, DB's, to keep as a souvenir of the occasion - this last probably a wise move, because if my mother-in-law is anything to go by, the civic china would be picked off piece by piece as souvenirs instead, the proud new citizens trying not to jangle as they walk back out onto the street... The civic hall was thrown open, the registrar disinterred from her records and a Former Lord Mayor was dusted down to add a certain weight to the proceedings. None of which comes for free, I'd imagine.

There was an uncertain tone to proceedings, with the FLM talking abut how clever we had been to choose our adopted city as a place to be naturalised -hmm, northern post-industrial cities are famous for their happy race relations, although to be fair this one is still an economic power house, which seems to take the edge off. She went on to say how she hoped that the new citizens would go on to enrich their communities, which kind of ignores the fact that for naturalisation you have to have been resident for at least three years previously... The most bizarre addition was a note about local libraries in the welcome pack that each candidate was given, what with them all being too stupid to have tracked them down over the last 900-odd days.

DB chose to affirm rather than swear allegiance, thank the gods that these days various faiths and none are recognised. Shame that she couldn't equally choose the figure to whom allegiance was due - I dunno, Eddie Izzard? Kelly Holmes? Sheila Kitzinger? there are probably about 59 million other folk in this country more worthy of respect than QEII, although I understand she does do a grand job. I was reminded of my mate's tale when he was in court over non-payment of his poll tax. As an atheist, his oath went "I swear on my honour to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" - it was only with great difficulty he resisted the urge to end "so help me, me."

DD showed her sound political instincts by wailing as her mum read out the affirmation, and continuing to the extent that I left the room with her. This
spared me the sight of DB shaking hands with FLM in front of a large portrait of Brenda, and also the difficult moral decision of whether to remain seated when invited to stand for the national anthem (it's these brave stands, er, sits, that bring the revolution ever closer, eh comrades?). DB is now upset that she'd requested a photograph, she hadn't realised what would be the background.

Yet, although I've been quite negative about it all so far, I should be more even-handed. For a start, as well as my personal interest in today's proceedings, I am professionally interested in ideas of national identity and nation-building. I am still not sure that there isn't a case for some kind of ceremony to mark the conferral of citizenship on an individual. Ideally, we would all be able to move and settle wherever in the world we would like; I can't help feeling that if we did have this right, 95% of us would stay put anyway - where are the floods from the EU accession countries that the scare-mongerers were predicting would swamp the nation's ports? There is a tendency for Western Europeans to assume that everyone else is clamouring to get in; I know enough Russians to know this isn't the case, whatever they believe in the Moscow embassy... On top of which, there weren't many controls on the cross-border movement of capital last time I looked. Another case of one law for the rich? Speaking of which, it's all very well giving people the right to move if they haven't got the means to assert this right. Did you know that there exist special visa regulations for entrepreneurs?

If the investment is considerably greater than the minimum £200,000 the Home Office is likely to be less stringent with the other requirements of
the rules and the application may be processed more quickly.

Given that we are still stuck with the notion of citizenship, is a ceremony better than just having the certificate plop through the letterbox? If we had a republic, then what I saw today would not be a bad basis to build on. The positive contributions made by immigrants to the UK were not only recognised but celebrated, as were the benefits of tolerance and diversity. The FLM spoke of the pride she took in having immigrant grandparents, and the choice of points of view this gave her. Ditch the assumption that everyone present had just got off the boat, so to speak, ditch the royal connotations, lose the exhortation from the FLM to go and support the local football team that could be understood as a pseudo-Tebbitian warning not to fail the cricket test, and you have the makings of an affirmation of multi-culturalism that I wouldn't have been too sorry to attend. 6/10 - give us the envelope through the door, for now.

Still, we celebrated DB's British citizenship appropriately: in a Japanese restaurant on St Patrick's Day.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Spiders...

2005-03-06T15:31:00.000Z

Phobia: n. An irrational fear.

It's not really irrational, though: Spiders are horrible, ugly, mean, vicious entities that have us exactly where they want us. The original spin doctors, expert at pulling strings, where do you think all this propaganda about their utility in catching flies comes from? Myself, I'm happy to have all the rotting matter about the place (naturally, I have in mind just now a wider space than just Dictionary Corner, thank you) aided in its decomposition by insects. And our lives would be far poorer without the phrase 'rushing round like a blue-arsed fly'. My gods, we even use the WWWeb - you're doing it right now! What self-respecting creature would survive by paralysing its prey, and letting it dissolve slowly into a ghastly albeit nutritious soup? They even exploit human medicine to survive - No? I once was tidying up under the sofa, and saw a Tune (if you don't know, these were, maybe still are, boiled cough sweets). I grabbed it, but the wrapper was an empty shell, and somewhere I swore I heard a spider chuckling in its newly-soothed throat.

There are three vignettes in my memory, which come to mind so often I no longer know are they genuine memories or (re-)inventions. In the first, I'm crouching down watching my dad gardening. He turns over a sod, and a biggish, not outlandish, spider crawls out. I move towards it - it's interesting, innit - and he says to me "Mind out, your grandad got a nasty nip off one of them." Interest diminishes, rapidly...

In the second, I'm a little older, standing in the garage, watching in horror as a fly struggles with not one but two spiders in the same web. The memory of the buzzing makes me shudder, even now.

In the third, I'm still a little lad. We're in France, Brittany to be more precise, and I'm stood in the garden of the gîte. It's a blazing hot sunny day,but I'm not happy. I look down at my arm, and there's a big, black, what I can only call a thing crawling down my arm. I swear, as it moves away, it's looking back at me.

On the principle "Know thy enemy", I've picked some information about spiders since then. For example, there are very few spiders native to the UK that can bite hard enough to puncture human skin, so there was no need to worry in the first scene. Cheers, Dad. Funnily enough, where I used to live in the South of Russia, houses and flats all had thin, long-leggedy spiders in each corner of the ceiling. They used to quiver on their legs, sensing vibrations or something, I don't know. Apparently, they are one of the most venomous known to us, but they don't have the jaw strength, apparently. Them and crane flies, not as harmless as they look.

Admittedly, the second memory puzzles me to this day: from everything I know spiders are solitary creatures, and are more prone to hunting easch other than hunting in unison - therein lies the horror of John Wyndham Lewis's Web. I've often thought that if I'm living a bad life, then a suitable punishment would be reincarnation as a male trapdoor spider... If I've done enough to keep within the same species, then most undesirable destination would be Shaman to the Amazonian tribes that subsist on giant tarantulas. Not only would the diet be dreadful, the job description includes regularly ingesting large quantities of mind-bending rain-forest 'shrooms and then going to commune with the spider gods. The horror, the horror...

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Plus ça change

2005-03-02T20:11:00.000Z

Déja vu: n. phr.The feeling that an event or situation has been lived through before.

This is mostly prompted by Jas's comment to my post of two days ago, but I reckon it stands as a post in its own right. The Home Secretary has told us not to worry, he'll consider seeking judicial approval of any house arrest orders (not any of the other curtailments of our basic rights of self-expression, assembly, or freedom of movement, mind you). So that's all right then, panic over - the judiciary does, after all, have an excellent record when it comes to terrorist hearings. I'm indebted to Fran Moran's enlightening annotated Pogues lyrics page - you'll need to scroll down a bit for the Birmingham Six commentary - for supplying the following quote from Lord Denning:

"Just consider the course of events if this action is allowed to proceed to trial... If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence, that the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further."

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

Bear with me, we'll get to C21 shortly.

2005-03-02T16:51:00.000Z

Astound: v.To evoke very strong feelings of surprise

In a seminar on gender roles and identity yesterday - a top night out, I'm sure you'll agree - it was said that the only thing Thatcher* ever did to widen employment opportunities for women was, obviously, to pass legislation allowing women to work down coal mines. I'd love a corroborating source for this fact if anyone has one. Incidentally, I'm not risking three points on my - newly-acquired - blogger's license, here; this is genuine chronology in spite of my opening salvo a couple of days ago.

*If this was pantomime:
a] someone would be holding up a sign saying 'Boo!'. As it isn't, let's make do with this, er, robust satire;
b] we'd not be short of a dame. They made her a hereditary peer, for gods' sake. Her poltroon son Mark, incidentally, doesn't look to be in any danger of being stripped of the title when it comes to him, despite both being implicated in coup-mongering and dropping his mates right in it to plea-bargain his way out of prison.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all!

My birthday is not February 28, 2005

2005-03-01T12:11:00.000Z

Coincidence: n. An event that seems uncannily linked to a second event, despite there being no obvious cause and effect relationship

For a moment there I thought the state was over-reacting in a big way with its new proposals for anti-terrorist legislation. So how foolish did I feel when, on the very same day that these proposals were due to be discussed in the House of Commons, a suspect changed his plea to guilty, thus providing the security apparatus with their first major terrorist conviction since 9/11? After all, as the head of the London Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorist branch observed:

"We must ask how a young British man was transformed from an intelligent, articulate person who was well respected, into a person who has pleaded guilty to one of the most serious crimes you can think of."

Read down the article, and you'll see what a surprise this volte-face caused to family and friends.

In other news, on February 9, Tony Blair made a public apology to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, for the original miscarriage of justice that led to their imprisonment, and for the whispering campaign against them that continued even after their release on a legal technicality.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all

Cooking on gas, not coal

2005-02-27T21:10:00.000Z

BS 5871: Parts 1, 2 & 3: Installation of gas fires, convector heaters, fire back boilers and decorative fuel effect gas appliances.

Well, here we are, after a brief play on a different blog, now sadly no more. I hope this one will last a little longer. I'd been considering a blog for some time, and even created a rudimentary XML-based blog, but rapidly got fed up with all the manual coding. Never mind coal mining*, adding mark-up tags, now that's proper hard work.

So I've finally been pushed into an off-the-peg blog after a row with a neo-Nazi on, of all things, a motorcycle Yahoo group. A listmate, the main target of the moron's bile, sent me some links, and after playing around a bit with them, I've decided I simply have to have one of my own. Why? Well, check this out, for example. We all need something to aspire to, do we not? The various posts will begin to reveal my obsessions (oh, sorry, so you already figured out what blogging's about, huh?), so I'd hate to spoil the surprise straight away. Feel free to leave your comments, everyone's welcome here, at least until they've proven they aren't.

* Coal-mining (a definition for younger readers)

n. Once the mainstay of many communities in the UK, until the miners, having been identified as the enemy within, were crushed by the Tory government during the 80s mining strike. This is not exaggeration - you now only just need a second hand to count the number of working pits, and the former mining areas were given no assistance. For instance, North Nottinghamshire is now blighted by heroin and other hard drug use. Mining has passed from a vital part of the country into history, becoming no more than the backdrop to films like Brassed Off and Billy Elliott. I have roots in Grimethorpe - O proud, defiant name for a town, you knew what you were built on...

A moving, bitter, angry elegy comes from one of the most under-rated bands of recent years. Gary Miller writes fine lyrics, and any outfit with Glenn Miller on accordion cannot be bad. This last clause is true. I fear they're no longer touring or recording, which is a crying shame when you consider the heights they reached on Think Positive! Start with that, but they've been good since before the first album, Nee Gud Luck.

It's all a load of bollocks, so bollocks to it all